A long story short at Cannes: when filmmakers explore both shorts and features

In 1955, the French director made La Pointe courte, her first feature film, and one that was noticed by the critics. Three years later, at the age of only 30, Agnès Varda made her appearance in the Short Film Competition with Ô saisons ô châteaux, a 22-minute documentary on the castles of the Loire. For both the filmmaker and the Festival, it marked the beginning of a long partnership.

In 1962, she entered the Feature Film Competition for the first time with Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7). This portrait of a young Parisian chanteuse quickly became a New Wave classic. Sixty years after her first steps at Cannes, Varda received an Honorary Palme d’or in 2015 for the entirety of her career. Today, one of the theatres of the Palais des Festival bears her name.

“Unlike a lot of filmmakers for whom short films are a sort of springboard towards feature films, I have often made short films, and that’s what they are – films! You can tell stories or express emotions, discoveries, instants, which are imagined in a short duration.”

Agnès Varda (source: Ciné-Bulles)

For Jim Jarmusch, winner of the Grand Prix at the Festival in 2005 for Broken Flowers, his journey with Cannes is much like his filmography: free, dense, talented.

The American director first appeared on the Croisette in 1984 with the feature film Stranger Than Paradise. Shot in black and white, this road movie screened at the Directors’ Fortnight won the Caméra d’or, awarded to the best debut film from any of the selections.

From then on, between 1986 and 2019, the filmmaker featured eleven times in the Official Selection, more often than not In Competition. It was in 1993 that he presented Coffee and Cigarettes (Somewhere in California), where Iggy Pop dialogues with Tom Waits. Winner of the Short Film Palme d’or, this film makes up one of the segments of the eponymous feature film released in 2003.

“I don’t really think about the length of a film when I’m shooting it, so I don’t have any hierarchical thing about, ‘Well, it’s not a feature.’ And having made short films, I know that sometimes it’s a lot harder than making a long film because you don’t the time to develop characters and so on. It’s more complicated, I think.”

Jim Jarmusch (source: The Austin Chronicle)

At the festival, Jane Campion has been a pioneer. When she won the Short Film Palme d’or for Peel in 1986, she was the first woman to do so.

Seven years later, she once again brought women to the summit of Cannes with The Piano. Winner of the Palme d’or for feature films, the movie tells the story of Ada, a young Scottish mother sent to New Zealand to be remarried to an unknown man. Disembarking on the beach, she is forced to abandon her piano, which will ultimately be recovered by a neighbour. Between keyboard strokes, a love triangle is slowly woven. Holly Hunter, the film’s main actress, also won the Best Actress Award in 1993.

To this day, Jane Campion – who has also presided over two juries: Short Films and Cinéfondation in 2013 and Feature Films the following year – is the only filmmaker to have a Palme d’or in each of these formats!

“Making short films is the way I learned and developed an appetite to make longer films. I didn’t want officially to be a feature director because I didn’t think about it. I didn’t have the experience. I couldn’t ever imagine a story that lasts two hours. For me, it was very important to make small steps.”

Jane Campion (source: Festival de Cannes)

It was with Koza, his very first film (with a length of 13 minutes) screened at the Short Films Competition, that the Turkish director debuted on the Croisette in 1995. Although he did not win the Palme d’or that year, this short film marked the entry into the Official Selection of a director who has become essential… and whose feature films win over the international Cannes jury year after year.

“Shooting [Koza] took a year. There was no script. I was trying to grasp a world that I could capture with my intuition, my perceptions. There was no dialogue. (…) I had no idea what it was like, because it was not like the movies I watched. But when I was accepted to the Cannes Film Festival, I felt a little more confident. Most of the cinema techniques that I tried to learn I did learn while shooting this movie.”

Nuri Bilge Ceylan (source: Vinyl Writers, English translation of an interview carried out in 1997 by the Turkish journal Radikal)

In 2003, Uzak won the Grand Prix and the Best Actor Award. In 2008, Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys) won the Award for Best Director. In 2011, it was the turn for Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) to win the Grand Prix.

The ultimate award came in 2014 with Winter Sleep, a claustrophobic family drama that unfolds as winter isolates a small hotel in Anatolia. That year, Quentin Tarantino handed Nuri Bilge Ceylan the Palme d’or.

Back in Feature Film Competition with Kuru Otlar Üstüne (About Dry Grasses) in 2023, the filmmaker added Best Actress Award to his Cannes prize list, thanks to the performance of actress Merve Dizdar.

Xavier Giannoli’s trajectory has also been marked by a successful transition from the short film to the feature. After a number of short films made in the 90s (Le Condamné, Terre Sainte, J’aime beaucoup ce que vous faites, Dialogue au sommet), the French director was noticed by the Cannes selection committee in 1998 with L’Interview, in which Mathieu Amalric plays a young journalist about to meet Ava Gardner, the mythical Hollywood actress… but nothing happens as planned.

For the script, Giannoli was inspired by a personal story. On the occasion of the producer Arnon Milchan’s birthday, he was sent to the shoot of Casino to interview Martin Scorsese and Robert de Niro. The project was cut short, however, when the actor got angry and humiliated him. Screened at the Short Film Competition, L’Interview won the Palme d’or. That year, the Jury’s president was none other than Martin Scorsese.

This recognition allowed him to move to feature films, notably Quand j’étais chanteur (The Singer) and À l’origine (In the Beginning), which competed for the Palme d’or in 2006 and 2009, respectively.

Short, feature, short, feature… The British filmmaker has constantly juggled between these two types of film since the beginning of her career. At Cannes, she first distinguished herself by her film school film Small Deaths, winner of the Short Film Jury Prize in 1996. Two years later, the Jury awarded her the same prize for Gasman.

“Unfortunately it’s [the short film] a format that is not very accessible to the general public. For filmmakers, however, it’s a very interesting format for trying new things, for experimenting. It’s also a different kind of enjoyment from that of a feature film, where there is plenty of money at stake and big teams at work.”
Lynne Ramsay (source: Festival de Cannes)

Moving to feature films, Lynne Ramsay has continued to leave a lasting impression at the Festival de Cannes. In 1999, Ratcatcher was screened in the Un Certain Regard section, whereas in 2011 she joined the Feature Film Competition with We Need to Talk About Kevin. The director’s talent was definitively acknowledged in 2017 with You Were Never Really Here, a feature film that won the Award for Best Screenplay (tied) and the Best Actor Award for Joaquin Phoenix. This critical success has not stopped Ramsay from regularly returning to short films, notably with Swimmer (2013) and Brigitte (2019).