Cannes Film Festival 2021: the Asian movies featured, including Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria with Tilda Swinton, and Hong Sang-soo’s latest

Ryusuke Hamaguchi returns to Cannes with an adaptation of Haruki Murakami short story Drive My Car, and two debut features from Chinese directors will be shown

Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul is back in competition with Memoria, an international production set in Colombia and starring Tilda Swinton

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Hidetoshi Nishijima (left) and Toko Miura in a scene from Drive My Car, an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguch. It is just one of the Asian movies that will be in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Published: 6:45pm, 3 Jul 2021Updated: 11:42am, 16 Jul 2021

The Cannes Film Festival is back after a fallow year, when it was reluctantly cancelled due to the pandemic, and has moved to July from its usual May slot.

Artistic director Thierry Fremaux has gathered an impressive roster of movies by art house auteur filmmakers, with the likes of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch), Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta and Sean Penn’s Flag Day in competition to win the coveted Palme d’Or for best film.

Assessing these and other entries will be a festival jury led by Spike Lee and which includes South Korean actor Song Kang-ho, back in Cannes two years after Parasite started its incredible journey to festival honours there.

And what of the Asian titles playing in the official selection? Fremaux recently lamented “we don’t have enough”, specifically referring to Chinese films in competition, but look around the entire selection and there are still plenty of exciting titles being unveiled at Cannes this year.

Drive My Car (Japan)

Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has only just screened his last film, Wheels of Fortune and Fantasy, at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize. Now he returns with an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story, starring Hidetoshi Nishijima as an actor-director nursing tragedy from his past as he travels to Hiroshima to mount a production of Uncle Vanya.