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“Why do they want to kill you?” At 15, Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti) is still daddy’s girl. She knows but doesn’t want to know the answer to her question, just as she has always known what Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci) does for a living — a very good living — but doesn’t acknowledge it to herself. “Money. Power. You don’t talk to these kinds of people,” her father shrugs. You wouldn’t want to talk to him either, not without an invitation.

Julien Colonna’s robust story of Corsican rule by the Mob is set in the ’90s, when the island was so thick with revenge killings that they were a nightly news feature. As The Kingdom opens, there has been peace between the Corsican crime families for years, but the eruption of a car bomb aimed at the president, who also happens to be Pierre-Paul’s closest friend, is a...

The shadow of The Godfather looms large over French director Julien Colonna’s formidable feature debut, The Kingdom (Le Royaume), and not only because one of the characters in it is literally called “Godfather.”

Set in Corsica in 1995, at a time when the island was wracked by warfare among nationalist groups and crime families, the film focuses on one mafioso clan that’s beset by enemies on all sides and needs to survive by any means necessary. The head of that clan is a very casually dressed Don Corleone named Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci), and he needs to both preserve his leadership and protect his teenage daughter, Lesia (the illuminating Ghjuvanna Benedetti), as they run from cops and mobsters alike.

So yes, it’s a very Godfather-like scenario — but it’s as if the Coppola classic were told from the viewpoint of a young Connie, chronicling how a girl on the...

Cannes isn’t Sundance. The movies on offer aren’t generally genre horror box office surprises or heartwarming indie dramedies, and sometimes they’re not even sure-fire Oscar hopefuls.

But as several sales agents and distributors told us, Cannes is slowly shifting back to being a home for discovery. With the audience now unbothered by subtitles, distributors aren’t just looking for the next “May December” but the next “Anatomy of a Fall.” And when it comes to the package titles on the Marché du Film, buyers are demanding more than the latest Nicolas Cage shark movie.

The sources IndieWire spoke to believe there’s more quality than quantity among this year’s official competition sales titles and the packages being shopped to distributors. And that’s a good thing, even though there are still plenty of hot packages trickling in by the day and buyers already scooping up competition...