Olli Mäki And The Neon Demon Are Invited To Cannes

The official selection has been announced for the 69th Cannes Film Festival (11th-22nd May 2016), which will include Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Girl (Denmark), and Juho Kuosmanen’s The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki (Finland).

Nicolas Winding Refn’s new horror thriller The Neon Demon will receive its World premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it is entered in the main competition programme. This will be Refn’s third entry at Cannes, having won Best Director for Drive in 2011, and returned in 2013 with Only God Forgives.

In The Neon Demon, Elle Fanning plays Jesse who moves to Los Angeles to carve out a career as a fashion model. She quickly becomes a part of a small group of women who are obsessed with beauty and perfection, and will stop at nothing to get what she has.

Juho Kuosmanen’s first full length feature, The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki (Hymyilevä mies), has been selected to compete in the Un Certain Regard competition, which was won by Rams (Hrútar) last year and went on to win a further 21 awards in 2015.

Lightweight boxer Olli Mäki was supposed to become the first Finnish boxer to defeat the US-American flyweight world champion. However, he lost it humiliatingly in the second round by a knock out in front of a packed stadium. According to him, it was the best day of his life, even though his girlfriend Raija is the only person to stand by him through it all.