Cannes Film Festival 2024: Kannada Film Sunflowers Were First Ones To Know Selected For La Cinef

The 77th annual Cannes Film Festival is around the corner and the organisation is busy preparing for the mega event. This year Payal Kapadia’s feature film All We Imagine As Light has entered the competition. It will compete for Palme d’Or with Andrea Arnold’s Bird, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, Francis Ford’s Megapolis and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, among a few others. Among them, Sunflowers Were First Ones To Know, a film by Chidanand Naik has been selected in the La Cinef competitive section.

Kannada film to light up Cannes Film Festival 2024

Sunflowers Were First Ones To Know (Original Kannada title Suryakanthihooge Modhalugothagidhu) narrates one of the oldest folk tales of Karnataka. It is about a village plunging into darkness after an elderly woman steals the rooster whose crowing causes the sun to rise every morning. Reacting to the news, the director said, "In our community the folk tale about the stolen rooster is a common idiom, everyone knows it." Naik is a Mysore-based filmmaker and an alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune.

The 28-year-old director added that he is from the Banjara community in Karnataka's Shimoga district and began collecting folk take from his community four years ago. "Ours is an oral culture, everything is transmitted orally. But folklore is diminishing today. The new generation doesn't know any folk tales from the community," he continued. He concluded by saying that a folk tale is a poetic text that carries some of its cultural contexts within it. It is also a travelling metaphor that finds new meaning with each new telling.

The film is among 18 shorts (14 live-action and 4 animated films) selected from a total of 2,263 films.

What is the Cannes Film Festival's La Cinef?

Cannes Film Festival's La Cinef section aims to promote emerging talents and acknowledge films from various film schools worldwide. The jury will present the La Cinef prize on May 23 at the Bunel Theatre after the screening of the selected films. A ceremony will be held.

All you need to know about Cannes 2024

This year's film festival is scheduled to start on May 14 and will conclude on May 25. American filmmaker and actress Greta Gerwig will serve as jury president for the main competition, while French actress Camille Cottin will host the opening and closing ceremonies. The festival will open with The Second Act directed by Quentin Dupieux.