Jafar Panahi, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Laura Poitras and other heavyweights of global cinema reflect on 2020 in this sweeping auteur anthology film for the age of COVID, screening direct from Cannes.

Shot in secret during the pandemic, The Year of the Everlasting Storm comprises seven shorts from some of the filmmaking firmament’s most acclaimed names. Billed as “a true love letter” to the storytelling power of the moving image, these collected tales are deeply personal responses to life under lockdown and, together, make up an extraordinary cinematic journal chronicling human existence during what was an unheralded historical moment.

Iran’s Panahi (3 Faces, MIFF 2018) and Thailand’s Weerasethakul (Cemetery of Splendour, MIFF 2015) are joined by Poitras, the Oscar-winning US documentary maker who was last seen at MIFF with The Oath in 2010, and American wunderkind David Lowery, whose Ain’t Them Bodies Saints wowed festival audiences – including at MIFF – in 2013. Also contributing segments are Singapore’s Camera d’Or–winning Anthony Chen (Wet Season, MIFF 2020) and Chile’s Dominga Sotomayor (Too Late to Die Young, MIFF 2019). Rounding out the list is Malik Vitthal, a young American director whose feature debut, Imperial Dreams, starred John Boyega and won Sundance’s Best of NEXT Audience Award in 2014.

“This portmanteau project achieves something remarkable … reconnecting us to a world inevitably transformed by the pandemic – a world where art lives on.” – Variety