A German leg of the refreshed Dogma filmmaking movement has been established by Tom Tykwer, Ilker Catak, Nora Fingscheidt, Helene Hegemann, and Kurdwin Ayub. 

The five filmmakers announced their intention to produce feature projects under the new Dogma rules during a press conference this afternoon at the Cannes Film Festival. The group is backed by the German-language distributor X Verleih and TrustNordisk, which has boarded as their international sales agent. ZDF and ARTE are set to enter as the broadcasting partners, while MOIN Film Fund has been confirmed as the first regional funding body.

The films produced by the filmmakers will be made as co-productions between X Filme Creative Pool and Zentropa Germany. Producing for X Filme are Jorgo Narjes, Uwe Schott, and Tom Tykwer. At Zentropa Germany, the producers are Solmaz Azizi, Louise Vesth, and Tine Mikkelsen. Ingo Fliess will produce on İlker Çatak’s forthcoming feature film. That film will be a co-production between if…Productions, X Filme, and Zentropa Germany.

The Dogma manifesto contains 10 new dogmas. You can read the full list of dogmas below. A group of Danish filmmakers, including Isabella Eklöf, relaunched the Dogma movement last year at Cannes.

THE VOW OF CHASTITY:
I vow to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGMA 25 :

1. The script must be original and handwritten by the director.
We compel ourselves to write the script by hand in order to nurture the kind of intuition that
flows most freely from the dream, channelled through the hand onto the paper.

2. At least half the film must be without dialogue.
We insist on a cinematic approach to filmmaking, because we believe in visual storytelling and have faith in the audience.

3. The internet is off limits in all creative processes.
We commit to produce the films relying on real people within our physical reality – rather than in a digital one infused with algorithms.

4. We’ll only accept funding with no content altering conditions attached.
We assume responsibility for keeping budgets down so the team retains final say in all artistic decisions.

5. No more than 10 people behind the camera.
We commit to working in close collaborations to build trust and strengthen our shared vision.

6. The film must be shot where the narrative takes place.
Film as an art form becomes artificial and generic when we portray a location in a false light.

7. We’re not allowed to use make-up or manipulate faces and bodies unless it’s part of the narrative.
Just as we strive to maintain the authenticity of the location, we also want to portray the human body without a filter. We celebrate it – warts and all.

8. Everything relating to the film’s production must be rented, borrowed, found, or used.
We commit to making films using objects that already exist and renounce the ahistorical and self-destructive culture of consumerism.

9. The film must be made in no more than one year.
We abstain from any lengthy processes that stand in the way of creative flow.

10. Create the film as if it were your last

Joan Collins and Isabella Rossellini look amazing.

Collins is fresh from the Cannes red carpet, where the night before she had outshone starlets a third — a quarter — her age. At 92, the actress brought a blast of old Hollywood glamour to a festival that, this year especially, has often felt strangely drained of it.

Her sculpted white orchid gown, a custom Stéphane Rolland Haute Couture number with a sweeping train, paired with dramatic black opera gloves, diamond jewelry and similarly encrusted needle-toe pumps, gave off unmistakable Alexis Carrington energy — a reminder of the 1980s, when Collins, as the scheming queen of Dynasty, practically dictated the decade’s fashion vocabulary.

“It was very exciting. I had my glam squad do me up, the hair, the makeup,” she says. “I looked — well, I won’t say how I looked, but you can read what they wrote.”

Sitting opposite me now on the Carlton Beach, Dame Joan is only slightly more casual, wearing a thigh-length patterned summer dress and oversized hexagonal sunglasses the size of tea saucers. Her famous mane is perfectly buffed into place.

Next to her, Isabella Rossellini is the bohemian counterpoint: Draped in a loose black-and-white patterned outfit with flashes of bright orange lining, her trademark pixie cut untouched by Cannes excess. Rossellini has flown in for this interview, joining Collins to discuss My Duchess, the first collaboration between the two screen icons.

But Rossellini skipped the red carpet entirely.

“I actually find it very intimidating,” she says. “It’s a whole production now. It’s not like when my mother [Ingrid Bergman] went to the Oscars. She wore her own jewelry, maybe something special that my father had bought for her.”

“Well, I wore my own jewelry last night,” Collins jumps in. “Because I didn’t want a security guard following me around. Which is what happens when they give you something to wear.”

The two women bounce off each other like old friends rather than first-time co-stars, veering effortlessly between fashion, film and stories from another era of cinema.

“Your father and I almost worked together,” Collins says suddenly, turning to Rossellini.

She launches into a sprawling anecdote about Sea Wife, the 1957 drama in which she starred opposite Richard Burton. Roberto Rossellini had originally been hired to direct.

“Roberto fought with Darryl Zanuck over my character, who was a nun, and Roberto wanted her to have sex, a relationship with Richard Burton’s character. He said that would be real, natural. They fought about it for a week while we played Scrabble in the sand. The studio wouldn’t budge and Roberto said, ‘Well, it’s not true to life,’ and left.”

Rossellini laughs. “My father really liked you.”

Collins recently posted a photo of her with Roberto Rossellini on Instagram on May 8, which would have been his 120th birthday. 

“She’s very big on Instagram,” Rossellini says.

“Oh, you have more followers than me,” Collins retorts. 

But Collins is not in Cannes simply to reminisce about the golden age of cinema. She’s here to launch My Duchess. Directed by Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) from a script by Louise Fennell, the film tells the story of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, the previously divorced woman King Edward VIII, later known as the Duke of Windsor, abdicated his throne to marry. It focuses on the final years of her life, when she lived in France under the control of her exploitative lawyer, Suzanne Blum, played by Rossellini. The film picks up after the death of the Duke of Windsor in 1972 and traces the Duchess’ physical and mental collapse under Blum’s control. 

“People thought she had died, but she hadn’t. This lawyer [Rossellini] came in an destroyed her. She spent the last eight or nine years of her life blind, deaf and dying. And no one knows that.”
But getting the project made took decades. My Duchess is the first feature from John Gore Studios, the new outfit launched by the Broadway impresario behind Hamilton and The Book of Mormon, who agreed to finance the project after Collins pitched it to him at a King’s Trust dinner in late 2023. Embankment Films is handling sales in Cannes.

Collins has been trying to make her Wallis Simpson film for 30 years. In the early 1990s, Collins met Mohamed Al-Fayed — the father of Dodi Fayed, who died with Princess Diana in the Paris car crash, and, at the time, the owner of London luxury department story Harrods. 

“I told him how fascinated I was with Wallis Simpson,” Collins recalls. “He said, ‘I own her house in France.’ So I went there.” 

She was shown around the house by Bahamas-born Sydney Johnson, the Windsors’ former valet. “The place was immaculate, it looked just as it did, just as it does in the film. There were two mannequins, one of the Duchess and one of the Duke. He was wearing a kilt. She was wearing Chanel, of course.”
Collins admits to feeling a kinship with Simpson, who was the target of the tabloids of her day. 

“This film is a bit of me getting back [at the press], because I had a lot of problems in my time,” she says. “They always saw me as the bad girl because of the roles I played. When I was in Dynasty, the press would say: ‘She’s just like that,’ and I wasn’t!”

For Collins’ fans, My Duchess is something of a revelation. As Simpson declines, the actress appears frail, diminished, stripped of poise and makeup. Frighteningly exposed.

“Joan has this combination that I have never seen before,” says Rossellini. “She is beautiful, has great beauty, great glamor, but absolutely no vanity whatsoever.” 

“No, I am not vain. I have never been vain,” Collins agrees. “I’ll answer the door in shorts with no makeup. I don’t care.”

That lack of vanity becomes the greatest weapon of My Duchess. The sight of Collins — one of the defining glamour figures of post-war cinema and television — as she physically withers onscreen is something we have never seen before. 

But there is, as Rossellini puts it, one “Joan Collins moment” in the film: when the Duchess finally snaps and lashes out at Blum. 

“I say the F-word one time in the film, in that scene,” says Collins with obvious delight. “As I was doing it, I thought: ‘I just told Ingrid Bergman’s daughter to F-off!’ ”

Despite the darkness of the material, there is an unmistakable lightness between the two actresses, perhaps because both have spent decades navigating the strange collision of celebrity image and artistic ambition. And both have also successfully adjusted to periods out of the spotlight. In an industry that often treats women as disposable, they are true survivors. 

“I started working in this business when I was 17, and my father told me, ‘If you are lucky, you can work until you’re 27,’ ” says Collins. Seventy-five years later, she notes that she’s had probably “had the longest-ever career in show business. I’m certainly the oldest working.”

She says the secret to career longevity, both for her and Rossellini, was surprisingly simple.

“We had good families. We never had problems with alcohol or drugs. And we always wanted to work.”
The woman who spent decades playing glamorous monsters is now playing a victim slowly erased from the world. By the end of My Duchess, stripped of makeup, jewelry and image, there is almost nothing left of the Joan Collins audiences think they know. At 92, after more than seven decades onscreen, Dame Collins may finally have found the one role that destroys the myth she spent a lifetime creating. 

EXCLUSIVE: The actor chosen to play the next James Bond has got “to ooze sex appeal,” as well as the obvious stuff, like well, actually being able to act, says 007 casting director Nina Gold.

Plus, as this column noted way back, the successful applicant picked to take on Ian Fleming’s Commander Bond should be young enough to play him in three or four, or more pictures.

Although Gold’s deal with Amazon MGM has just been officially signed, she’s been keeping an eye out for potential heirs to Daniel Craig for quite a while. 

Craig, by the way, shot five pictures for Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson at Eon Productions: Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die. 

Last month I saw Gold at a bunch of first night’s in London’s West End; one week we happened to be at three productions on consecutive nights. It’s no secret that casting directors all over check out creatures of the stage. That’s how the former Bond execs found Craig. For Broccoli, it was the combination of Craig’s work in Matthew Vaughn’s 2004 film Layer Cake (which also featured Ben Whishaw, the future “Q”), what she’d seen of him on stage in David Rabe’s Hurlyburly at the Old Vic and his performance opposite Michael Gambon in Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Royal Court Theatre.

Gold politely nodded as I recited my stats at Charles Finch’s A Rabbit’s Foot Annual Filmmakers dinner, sponsored by Montblanc, at Fred L’Ecailler’s seafood establishment.

She kept on nodding when I mentioned David Shields who was so good in James Graham’s award winning play Punch which ran int the Nottingham Playhouse, the Young Vic and on Shaftesbury Avenue at the Apollo. And for good measure I threw in Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson who’s very much a theater animal having acquitted himself well opposite James Norton and Omari Douglas in Ivo van Hove’s production of A Little Life. Gold can check him out when he appears with Keira Knightley and Stephen Dillane in the stage adaptation of The Lives of Others in the fall. That’s about the time when Bond director Denis Villeneuve will evaluate Gold’s suggestions.

She joked that if I’ve cast Commander Bond by then, I should let her know!

Filmmaker Ira Sachs, in town for the the premiere of his competition film The Man I Love, joined in the conversation. However, his primary aim was to have his photograph taken with Gold because “she gave Ben Whishaw a big movie” break  in Jane Campion’s Bright Star. “Ben wants a photo of us,” Sachs explained.

Sachs directed Whishaw in last year’s Peter Hujar’s Day.

Others at the cocktails and seated dinner included Toheeb Jimoh (Ted Lasso) and partner Wawa, an advocate for environmental justice. Jimoh also appears with Sophie Okonedo in Clarissa (also cast by Gold). Adapted from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.Dallaway by brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri,cthe film plays Directors’ Fortnight today.

Sony Pictures Classics co-presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard were hob-nobbing with film festival chieftains Julie Huntsinger (Telluride), Daniel Battsek (New York), Alberto Barbera (Venice), Melita Toscan du Plantier (Marrakesh, and a Rabbit’s Foot honoree along with filmmaker Nadine Labaki). Director James Gray snuck in late, but then he is busy preparing for tonight launch’s of his latest picture, Paper Tiger, which is playing in competition.

I sat near Paris-based Canadian singer Charlotte Cardin who was telling me how she performed for Jane Fonda at soiree hosted by L’Oreal. Her latest album is out in October.

Barnaby Thompson, a fellow Brit, was at the very noisy table next to ours. I’m a huge fan of his documentary Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean which is playing in Cannes Classics. Diego Luna, here for special Cannes screenings of his Ashes movie, scooted across the restaurant to embrace Thompson. They worked together 20 years ago  on Oliver Parker’s Fade to Black. 

Thompson, well aware that Luna and I know each other, asks whether I knew that the actor-director was British? “Half a Brit,” Luna corrects. 

His mother was a British costume designer who died when Luna was a toddler. The boy was raised by his dad in Mexico. “But I can be very British when I want to,” he says putting on a Cockney accent. In any case, he supports Arsenal, which is fine by me!

Partying With The Club Kids

The dinner was lively and fun but the decibel levels were mere whispers compared to the music DJ Bobby Beethoven was blasting out at the after party for Jordan Firstman’s feature sensation Club Kid. The bash at Lucia Beach was packed from dance floor to the sea. 

Loved seeing Matty Matheson who plays Neil on The Bear. He tells me he’s in Cannes for the market where he’s been having meetings for the movie Grind which he executive produced.

I do a little cha-cha dance step to DJ Carly’s Gimme Strength, appropriate because it’s now 2 o’clock in the morning and strength is one thing I ain’t got. Then Marina Sena & Psirico’s Carnival plays and it gives me a shot in the arm. Bar staff are dancing atop a column attempting to pour champagne down a woman’s throat. 

Odessa A’zion does the sweetest thing and hands Firstman a posy of flowers. Takes him a millisecond to fathom who it is behind glasses and hair bunched up. Horror star Maika Monroe is with her beau Dalton Gomez. British producer and distributor Zygi Kamasa is involved with Monroe’s Cannes movie Victorian Psycho via his True Brit Entertainment.

There are a lot of Brit producers in town including Dominic Tighe, who’s trying to set up deals for his Giant Productions. Did a double-take when I saw Tighe because I used to cover him and his wife, the actress Katherine Kingsley when they used to grace the musical theater stage, but as we know, there’s always been a lot of cross-over between stage and screen. 

The BFI Is M.I.A.

Suddenly realized that I haven’t heard a word from the usually nice folk at the British Film Institute who notably did not invite me to their luncheon reception yesterday. Perhaps, it’s to do with the fact that they have no produced titles at Cannes this year although they did co-finance Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, which I happen to think is a bloody great film. The BFI and BBC Film should be shouting from the rooftops about this picture but not a word has been heard from either. Then again, I do hear from many in the international film community about how stand-offish the BFI and BBC Film can be. And Jeezus, don’t I know it.

Someone hands me an invitation to another party for later Saturday night that’s billed to go on until 5am. No way.