The Cannes Film Festival this week will feature not just one, but two ‘Made in Montana’ films, one shot in Livingston and the other in the Missoula area.

Montana Film Commissioner Allison Widmer said the two films are ‘Wildlife’ starring Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal, and ‘Rainmaker’, a short film by Missoula filmmaker Katherine Cronyn.

“Wildlife is based on a Richard Ford novel circa 1960, and the other is ‘Rainmaker’, which is written, produced and stars Katherine Cronyn,” she said. “The Cannes Film Festival runs during the second and third weeks in May, and there are different events that happen. Many of the exclusive film production houses rent yachts and houses and hotel lobbies. There are thousands of films being shown, marketed and distributed all over the world.”

Katherine Cronyn, author of Rainmaker, shared her deeply personal story about how the film was made.

“My father and I co-wrote and produced the film, and he’s been in the film industry all his life, (being directly related to Hollywood legends Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy)” she said. “He lives in Montana full time, I live in Los Angeles, but we’re both Montanans. The story is about two women in the same family dealing with eating disorders. The lead character is played by myself, and she is dealing with kind of a demonic entity which represents the illness, and she has to choose between that entity, which is both frightening and seductive, when she realizes that there are implications that affect her daughter, so it deals with the multi-generational aspect of mental illness.”

The young actress playing Cronyn’s daughter is Kira Bennett.

Cronyn said there is a message she and her father are attempting to convey in the film.

“I really hope that it can serve as an insight to what it’s like to have a disease like that,” she said. “It’s a very misunderstood disease, so I’m really hoping to give people an open doorway into what it may be like for someone who is suffering.”

The Cannes Film Festival is May 8–19 in Cannes, France.

 

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