Women on Top: Sydney Film Festival Highlights

The pre-lockdown film festival format is slowly beginning to return to the world – Bologna’s famous annual Il Cinema Ritrovato event has, for instance, rescheduled itself to August 25-31 – but we are all poised to see whether some changes will be longer lasting in their effects. The odd media spectacle of Cannes ‘blessing’ the list of films it would have premiered is the first sure sign that likely major items on the festival circuit (from Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch to Leos Carax’s musical Annette) are, so far, holding themselves back from the public and lying in wait for the best post-Cannes opportunity in the cinema calendar.