Cannes

Visitors to Venice could be forgiven for not realizing that beyond the majesty of St. Mark's Square and the romance of gondola rides lies a city that helped provide a baseline of what the world knows today about containing pandemics.

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The Venice Film Festival returns on Sept. 1 with an ultra-glitzy lineup, including the world premiere of sci-fi blockbuster "Dune" and Kristen Stewart's turn as Princess Diana, cementing its status as a serious rival to Cannes.

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The world-renowned news magazine TIME has selected Turkey's prominent tourism hotspot Bodrum as one of the world's 100 greatest places in 2021.

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Choosing only one destination from the country, the magazine called the district of the southwestern province of Muğla the "St. Tropez of Turkey."

After being shortlisted at Cannes, the producers of 'Displaced' - a short film about two table tennis enthusiasts struggling to keep their neglected sport alive - are preparing for more success around the world.

For Tudor Giurgiu, the President of the Transylvania International Film Festival, the most important thing that TIFF managed in the past twenty years is that it changed "some destinies".

Julia Ducournau's "Titane," a wild body-horror thriller featuring sex with a car and a surprisingly tender heart, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, news wires reported. Ducournau became the second female filmmaker to win the festival's top honor in its 74 year history.

Shock-fest "Titane" took home the top Palme d'Or prize at Cannes on July 17, revealed early at the closing ceremony in an embarrassing slip-up by jury president Spike Lee.

French director Julie Ducournau is only the second woman to scoop the prize, for a movie that was one of the wildest, sexiest and most violent ever shown at the Cannes film festival.

After making one of the most successful adult animated films of all time in "Waltz With Bashir", Israeli director Ari Folman vowed never to tackle the mind-bending complexity of such projects again.

But when he got the chance to bring the iconic story of Anne Frank to the big screen for children, he couldn't resist - even though it ended up taking over his life for eight years.

Reflecting the quality of filmmaking in the Balkans in recent years, three films from the region are up for prizes in Cannes in July.

In the short film category, Severen Pol [North Pole], a co-production between North Macedonia and Serbia, and Pa Vend [Displaced] from Kosovo are among a total of 10 films shortlisted from 3,739 reviewed.

The party of France's far-right leader Marine Le Pen performed weaker than expected in the first round of regional elections on June 20, in a vote marked by record levels of abstention.

Early projections showed the center-right Republicans party on course to top June 20's vote, while Le Pen's National Rally undershot predictions based on voter surveys conducted last week.