Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Neon’s Win, Lynne Ramsay’s Vampire, and a Flamingo.
Let’s go!
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And the Palme d’Or goes to Neon’s It Was Just an Accident.
This marks the indie studio’s 6th Cannes win in a row. With the six films garnering:
2 Academy Awards for Best Picture
10 Oscar wins
19 Oscar nominations
Full breakdown of Neon’s Cannes wins and Oscars results:
It Was Just an Accident (2025)
Anora (2024)
Oscar: Best Picture Winner
5 wins / 6 nominations
Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
Oscar: Best Original Screenplay
1 win / 4 nominations
Triangle of Sadness (2022)
0 wins/ 3 nominations
Titane (2021)
0 nominations
Cannes cancelled (2020)
Parasite (2019)
Oscar: Best Picture Winner
4 wins / 6 nominations
By the end of the festival, Neon had acquired 5 out of the 23 Cannes Official Selection (Mubi had 8 out of 23, including It Was A Simple Accident for UK/Ireland + 5 international territories).
As Academy Voters become more international, the Cannes Festival becomes an even more critical arena for films to reach American audiences. Overall, the films that played at Cannes last year took 31 Oscar nominations.
But will the films take a larger bite out of the worldwide box office? Last year’s official selection grossed $250M ($57.4M domestic). Not bad for “art house films,” although nowhere near the top-grossing Palme d’Or film of all time, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) grossed $221.1M worldwide.
Jeremy Strong closed Cannes with a powerful statement:
“Ibsen talked about, ‘Deep inside, there’s a poem in a poem. And when you hear that, when you grasp that, you will understand my song… And I feel that this film and the other films have these poems within the poem that allow us to grasp something ineffable that have changed me.”
For More:
Our full breakdown of the winners. The Palme d’Or wasn’t Neon’s only prize.
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Starz launches four new shows.
Oscar-winning production designer Les Dilley (Star Wars) dies at 84.
Prime’s The Wheel of Time cancelled after Season 3.
Ezra Miller is circling a reunion with Lynne Ramsay (dir: We Need to Talk About Kevin).
Christian Friedel (Zone of Interest) joins The Idiots, a Dostoyevsky-inspired film.
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo wins Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Prize.
Neon acquires North American rights for Arco, an animated magical rainbow adventure.
Neon’s Orwell: 2+2=5, a George Orwell doc, sells to 16 territories.
Sentimental Value (Neon) wins the Grand Prix at Cannes.
Josh O’Connor will star in Joel Coen’s Jack of Spades.
A24 shuts down its doc division.
Sirât, a desert-set father-son rave odyssey, wins the Cannes Jury Prize.
UK’s Signature Entertainment acquires horror Eye for an Eye.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Shortly after its separation from Lionsgate, Starz is working on building its own library, opening up its writers' room for a number of in-development series:
All Fours (IMDBPro link)
Synopsis: A middle-aged woman embarks on a journey of self-discovery and sexual awakening.
Brad Pitt’s Plan B (Adolescence) produces. Source Material: novel by Miranda July (Dir: Kajillionaire).
Kingmaker
Synopsis: The high-stakes world of the DC Black political elite.
Al Letson (writer: Monarch) and Theo Travers (Billions) will EP and co-showrun.
Fightland
Synopsis: A disgraced and formerly incarcerated boxing champion returns to London to seek vengeance against the crime family he thinks betrayed him.
Producer: 50 Cent.
Masquerade
Synopsis: An American woman in Venice who takes on a new identity at a European wedding, using the art of seduction in a murderous con to escape her past.
Starz’s programming strategy includes putting out eight to ten original series a year.
Tidbit:
Oscar-winning production designer Les Dilley, known for Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, died at age 84 from Alzheimer’s. Celebrated for a six-decade career, he was honored with two Oscars and a BAFTA. He created worlds and entire planets with his production design, plain to see in Star Wars, which still sticks to his bible even today.
Cancellations:
Prime’s The Wheel of Time (Ending with Season 3)
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
We need to talk about Ezra Miller. Lynne Ramsay (Dir: We Need to Talk About Kevin) has teamed back up with Miller to make a vampire film.
No details are known, and the project is in early development. But imagining a humanistic yet deeply psychologically petrifying vampire film with the haunting Miller through Ramsay’s lens would be sublime.
She has a way of drawing out her actors’ darkest devils, like in We Need to Talk about Kevin, which saw Miller commit the most unthinkable of crimes… and get a lot of pleasure out of it (trailer).
If these two reunite, we’re in for a bloody good time.
Christian Friedel joins The Idiots: He joins the new film from Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert, based on the novel The Gambler Wife. The story follows Dostoyevsky and his wife Anna during their honeymoon in Baden, which inspired his novel The Idiot.
Friedel was brilliant in the Palme d’Or winning The White Ribbon as a school teacher, who was ice-cold boring in Zone of Interest as a Nazi commander and played the put upon hotel manager Fabian in the most recent season of White Lotus. The man has an impeccable ability to serve the scene and has a massive range that lets him film any scene he is in with maximum believability and realism.
Filming on The Idiot begins next month.
Wilson Bethel (Daredevil), Keith Carradine (Nashville), and Jackson Kelly (The Pitt) have joined the cast of Imperfect Women, the upcoming Apple TV+ limited series starring and executive produced by Elisabeth Moss and Kerry Washington.
Based on Araminta Hall’s novel, the psychological thriller explores buried secrets, guilt, and betrayal within the three women's long-standing relationship.
We don't know much about these new characters just announced, but Bethel played Bullseye in the recently revived Daredevil series. He has a beautiful way of playing a man absolutely unhinged and losing his mind.
Tidbit:
Chazz Palminteri (A Bronx Tale) and Robert Davi (License to Kill) are set to star in mafia thriller Bad News on the Doorstep alongside their sons Dante Palminteri (Rocky’s) and Nick Davi (Paper Empire). Set in 1950s New Jersey, the coming-of-age crime film comes from director Tom DeNucci and was produced by Verdi Productions (Bleed for This).
FESTIVALS
Cannes Un Certain Regard Prize winners:
Un Certain Regard Prize (1st Place)
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo
Dir/Wri: Diego Céspedes
Feature Debut
Synopsis:
1982. As an unknown disease begins to spread in a small mining town in the Chilean desert, gay men are accused of transmitting it through their eyes. Twelve-year-old Lidia, the only girl in the community, sets out in search of the truth.
Plus, a full list of Un Certain Regard winners (plus trailers), including one for A24 and another for Harris Dickinson’s film: https://theindustry.co/p/cannes-un-certain-regard-2025-winners
Market acquisitions:
Neon takes North American rights for Arco. The animation follows a magical time-travelling rainbow and is produced by Natalie Portman and her company MountainA (May December). No word on release date, but Portman is part of the English-language cast.
Neon’s Orwell: 2+2=5 a documentary on George Orwell by Raoul Peck (dir: I Am Not Your Negro) has sold to 16 territories internationally France’s Le Pacte (Anora, Heretic).
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Sentimental Value has made a big splash at Cannes, taking home the Grand Prix (2nd place) award on Saturday night.
Director Joachim Trier is a Cannes favorite, with his previous films The Worst Person in the World (2021) and Louder Than Bombs (2015) similarly being nominated for the Palme d’Or.
The film follows an emotionally damaged actress attempting to communicate with her family after the death of her mother. It explores our aversion to discussing important subjects with family, instead expressing them through metaphor.
In Sentimental Values, the metaphor that is used to approach these uncomfortable subjects is cinema.
Trier notes he is particularly interested in pairing these moments with his male characters.
Looking through Trier’s catalogue of work, this can be seen: a man coming to terms with his imminent death in The Worst Person in the World, or a widower dealing with his grief-fueled suicidal impulses in Louder Than Bombs.
The emotionally vexed man in Sentimental Value is chiefly Stellan Skarsgård’s Gustav, who describes his family as his “crew.”
The actor became interested in working with Trier because he believed the director could bring something out of him that no one else could.
During the Cannes 2025 press conference, Trier reflected:
“Tenderness is the new punk.”
Although he was referring to the emotional themes of his movies, it seems this is a motto for his directorial method.
No word on release date from Neon.
After a four-year hiatus, Joel Coen is back in the director’s chair for Jack of Spades with Josh O’Connor set to star.
Coen hasn’t directed a film since his first solo venture, the stylistic noir take on Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021, trailer), which starred Denzel Washington in one of his best performances of his career opposite Coen’s wife, the two-time Oscar winner Frances McDormand.
Set to shoot in Scotland this summer, plot details for Jack of Spades are being tightly kept under wraps, but with the Coen name attached, it is one to look out for.
A24 has shut down its doc division in the wake of a difficult market for nonfiction fare. Some of its most popular documentaries include:
The Last of the Sea Woman (2024)
A fierce group of South Korean divers fights to save their vanishing culture from looming threats.
Occupied City (2023)
Dir: Steve McQueen
Amy (2015)
Winner: Best Doc at the 2016 Oscars
Box Office: $24M
A24 will continue with distribution of their previously acquired docs, including André Is an Idiot and Architecton.
Tidbit:
97-year-old filmmaker Michael Roemer passed away over the weekend. Films like Nothing but a Man (1964), a civil rights romance story, and the comedy The Plot Against Harry (1971, trailer) have resurfaced, with the latter even getting restored in 4K in 2023. The renewed appreciation for Roemer’s body of work will leave a lasting impact.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Oliver Laxe’s Sirât impresses at Cannes and wins Jury Prize (3rd place).
Heat, music, intensity. The desert is the best place for a rave, really.
In Sirât, a father and son must travel through the North African desert alongside a group of nomadic ravers to find his missing daughter.
Each of Laxe’s previous films has screened at Cannes:
You All Are Captains (2010)
Mimosas (2016)
Fire Will Come (2019)
Sirât, much like a rave, ebbs and flows hypnotically with peaks of tension and moments of joy. Like a few other films at Cannes this year (see Urchin and Alpha), it looks unflinchingly at the themes of addiction and obsession.
Somehow raw and mythical at the same time, this piece of cinema will be added to the already impressive roster of movies acquired by Neon this year.
Netflix is expanding its Argentine slate with the streamer greenlighting:
Lo dejamos acá
Cast: Oscar-nominee Ricardo Darín (The Secret in Their Eyes)
Synopsis: A psychoanalyst who loses faith in traditional methods
El último gigante
Dir: Marcos Carnevale (Goyo)
Synopsis: A charismatic tour guide unexpectedly reunites with his estranged father
Production has kicked off on both films.
Tidbit:
Signature Entertainment (Terrifier 3) has acquired U.K. and Irish rights to Eye for an Eye, a horror film based on Elisa Victoria’s graphic novel Mr Sandman. Colin Tilley directs; HanWay Films is handling sales.
ON THIS DAY
2002. The Pianist wins the Palme d'Or.
See you tomorrow!
Written by Gabriel Miller, Molly Wise, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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