Playtime Unveils Robust Cannes Sales Slate, Including Competition Titles ‘Homecoming’ and ‘About Dry Grasses’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Paris-based Playtime has unveiled a strong Cannes film market sales slate, which includes competition titles About Dry Grasses and Homecoming.

About Dry Grasses is by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who won the Palme dOr in 2014 for Winter Sleep. The film follows Samet, a young art teacher, who is finishing his fourth year of compulsory service in a remote village in Anatolia. After a turn of events he can hardly make sense of, he loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in, and hopes that his encounter with fellow teacher Nuray will help him overcome his angst. Deniz Celilolu, Merve Dizdar and Musab Ekici are among the cast.

Homecoming, by French director Catherine Corsini who won the 2021 Queer Palm for The Divide, follows Khdidja, who minds a wealthy Parisian familys children for a summer in Corsica. She brings along her own two teenage daughters for whom it is an opportunity for them to go back to the island they left 15 years earlier, in tragic circumstances. While their mother grapples with her memories, the two girls indulge in all the summer temptations but questions surface about the familys distant past on the island. The cast includes Virginie Ledoyen, Denis Podalyds, Assatou Diallo Sagna, Esther Gohourou, Suzy Bemba, Lomane de Dietrich, Cdric Appietto, Jean Michelangeli and Marie-Ange Geronimi.

The film was in the news recently after alleged inappropriate incidents during production of the film were refuted by Corsini and her producer Elisabeth Perez.

The past also rears its head in Erwan De Lucs No Love Lost, which closes Cannes Critics Week, where a woman resurfaces after 16 years, sending the family into turmoil. The cast features Nahuel Prez Biscayart, Maud Wyler, Cleste Brunnquell, Alexandre Steiger, Camille Rutherford and Mercedes Dassy.

Robin Campillo, who won multiple awards at Cannes 2017 with 120 BPM, is back with 1970s, Madagascar-set coming-of-age tale Red Island, which will play as a market screening ahead of its French release by Memento Distribution. Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Quim Gutirrez, Charlie Vauselle, Luna Carpiaux and David Serero are in the cast.

In addition, Playtime has newly acquired comedy Testament by Denys Arcand (2003 Oscar winner for The Barbarian Invasions), starring Rmy Girard and Sophie Lorain; Olivier Pys period drama Molires Last Stage, with Laurent Lafitte, Stacy Martin and Bertrand de Roffignac, distributed in France by Memento; and Pierre Godeaus drama Headwind, starring Franois Damiens and Salom Dewaels, where a famous actor who, after agreeing to play the impossible character of Jacques Brel, realizes that it might be the last role of his life and leaves to see his daughter, whom he has not seen grow up.

Playtime is also representing two films by young French women directors. Through the Night, Delphine Girards first feature film, based on her Oscar-nominated short film, A Sister, deals with an assault at a party and its aftermath. The cast includes Selma Alaoui, Veerle Baetens, Guillaume Duhesme and Anne Dorval.

In Cline Rouzets For Night Will Come, the day they move into a new neighborhood, the Feral family plan to look as normal and friendly as possible. But when their teenaged son Philemon gets closer to his new neighbor, Camila, his thirst for blood grows and his difference becomes impossible to hide. The cast includes Elodie Bouchez, Jean-Charles Clichet, Mathias Legout Hammond and Cleste Brunnquell.

The Playtime slate also includes arthouse horror The Devils Bath, by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz (Goodnight Mommy, The Lodge), based on an unknown chapter of European history and is about women, religion and ritual murders; documentary Antarctica Calling by Luc Jacquet, director of the Oscar-winning March of the Penguins Caroline Vignals comedy Its Raining Men, starring Laure Calamy and Vincent Elbaz; and Fernando Coimbras noir Carnaval Is Over, featuring Leandra Leal, Pp Rapazote and Irandhir Santos.