Roundup: Lanthimos, Nemes compete for Palme d'Or at Cannes

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster was screened Friday among competition movies at the ongoing 68th Festival de Cannes.

The movie is a love story set in the near future where single people, according to the rules of the city, are arrested and transferred to the hotel. There they are obliged to find a matching mate in 45 days. If they fail, they are transformed into an animal of their choosing and released into the woods. A desperate man escapes from the hotel to the woods where the loners live and falls in love, although it is against their rules.

The aim of the movie, according to the director, is to show different and various worlds, within which different groups had to follow very specific rules in certain ways like we do in our society.

Life for single people in our world can be tough after a certain age, said the director, adding, "There is always an awkwardness in social relationships between single people and couples."

"It's very subversive and funny and honest about relationships in a very stylized way, I like the absurd," said U.S. actor John C. Reilly about the script.

Reilly is also in another movie selected for the main competition of this year's festival, Il Racconto Dei Racconti (Tale of Tales).

For Oscar winner Rachel Weisz, it was a great experience to have Lantimos "conduct and hypnotize" all the actors into his imaginary world.

Playing the lead role in the movie, Irish actor Colin Farrell said the incredible detailed script helped him to get into the character in the movie where everybody lied and never said their minds.

This is the first time Lanthimos competes in the main competition at Cannes, but he won the "Un Certain Regard" prize in 2009 for his movie Dogtooth.

On Friday afternoon, Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes' first feature film Saul Fia (Son of Saul) was also screened.

The story took place in 1944 at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Auslander is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination.

While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the corpse of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child's body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner's Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.

A total of 19 films were selected to compete for the top prize Palme d'Or. The 68th Festival de Cannes runs from May 13 to 24. Endit