Feast your eyes on the first trailer for Cannes favorite Emilia Perez
The first trailer for the French release of Emilia Perez is here
Film News Cannes
Last month, Emilia Perez took the Cannes Film Festival by storm. Jacques Audiard’s audacious musical about a transgender Mexican drug cartel leader premiered to critical acclaim and earned a joint Best Actress prize for its trio of stars: Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Karla Sofía Gascón. Netflix has been circling a deal for the U.S. and U.K. rights, but the film is set to premiere in France in August. Ahead of that premiere, Pathé Films has released the first trailer for the movie.
Emilia Perez follows a lawyer named Rita (Saldaña), who is offered a lucrative opportunity to escape her life if she can help the infamous cartel leader Manitas (Gascón) escape his own. Years after assisting Manitas in secretly undergoing gender reassignment surgery, Rita is once again contacted by the titular Emilia Perez, who seeks Rita’s help reuniting with and relocating her wife (Gomez) and children.
Audiard was inspired to write an “opera libretto” based on a plot point about a drug dealer planning to get gender reassignment surgery in Boris Razon’s novel Écoute. After casting Gascón in the role, she “had a lot of conversations with him over the years—sending a lot of emails, and a lot of pictures of my body to inform a lot of scenes. We really interacted and we nourished each other mutually, so it went both ways,” Gascón told Vanity Fair. “He developed a better, deeper understanding [of trans identity] than when we started. He had a different feeling for the subject because it became less theoretical for him.”
Gascón dedicated her emotional Best Actress acceptance speech at Cannes to all trans people “who suffer and must keep faith that changing is possible,” adding, “If you have made us suffer, it is time for you also to change,” per Variety. Speaking with the outlet at the festival, she said, “I think this movie is about the power of femininity. It starts in a very dark, male-dominated, violent world and, thanks to community, it becomes brighter and better.”