Anurag Kashyap’s ‘Kennedy’, Starring Sunny Leone, To Be Screened At Cannes 2023

The official line-up of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival was unveiled on Thursday, and only one Indian film has made it to the list. Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap’s film ‘Kennedy’ has been selected to be screened at the upcoming edition of the Cannes Film Festival.

Starring Sunny Leone, Rahul Bhatt and Abhilash Thapliyal, Kennedy will be screened at the Midnight Screenings section of the festival, which will take place from May 16-27. Details about the movie have been kept under wraps.

Kennedy At Cannes

Kashyap has been a regular presence at the Cannes Film Festival. His multigenerational gangster cult classic Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) was screened at the 2012 Cannes Directors' Fortnight, an independent selection of the Cannes Film Festival.

The anthology film Bombay Talkies, on which Kashyap served as one of the directors, premiered under Special Screenings at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

His thriller Ugly was screened in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation, which he followed up with neo-noir thriller Raman Raghav 2.0 which debuted at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival in the Director's Fortnight section.

Cannes line-up

New films by Wes Anderson, Alice Rohrwacher, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Todd Haynes and Wim Wenders will compete for the Cannes Film Festival’s coveted top honour, the Palme d’Or, as will a record number of films directed by women.

Cannes has often come under criticism for selecting few films by women for its prestigious competition lineup. Only two female filmmakers have ever won the Palme d’Or: Jane Campion in 1993 for The Piano and Julia Ducournau in 2021 for Titane. While six out of 19 films is a new high, it still falls below the parity that some have sought, reports The Associated Press.

Suggested Reading: Messy And Badass: Revisiting Anurag Kashyap’s Female Characters, From Dev D To Choked