Séamas McSwiney previews this year's Cannes Film Festival, which comes once more with an international flavour
With summer drawing near in the south of France, the stars will come out in broad daylight early this evening for the opening of the 66th annual Cannes Film Festival. They will climb the red-carpeted steps of the Festival Palace to the firefly camera flashes and cries of Leonardo! Carey! Steven! Nicole!
The opening film is the fourth adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic novel The Great Gatsby, marking a timely revisit to its themes of financial excess and decadence. And though you may not have the chance to share the rare oxygen of the Lumiere Theatre with the Hollywood elite, you can see Baz Luhrmann’s new spectacular 3D version of Gatsby nationwide just a day later.
Luhrmann’s Gatsby was ready months ago but the studio decided to wait for Cannes and open worldwide in the same week, thus taking full advantage of the planetary press binge and this unique red carpet photo opportunity.
Cannes is elitist and aristocratic, but it is also egalitarian in some very important ways. In the official selection, alongside the commercial mastodons from Hollywood are included normally unsung works of fine filmmaking. Though they might not reach quite the same level of hyper-attention, they do receive at least equal critical attention. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg is this year’s jury president, and among other luminaries he has Nicole Kidman at his side to make the choices.
We’ve suggested it before in these pages that, while Los Angeles is the world capital cinema, for 12 days in May the Riviera city of Cannes becomes the capital of world cinema. Among the dozen or so invited categories and among the 1,000-or-so films screened, there is a section that deliberately sets out to prove this. It is called Cinemas du Monde and is funded in various ways by French institutions.
Haitian director Raoul Peck will provide patronage for emerging directors from Algeria, Armenia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Kenya, the Philippines and Rwanda. Their purpose is to make further international connections and find partners to collaborate on their future films.
As reported previously in Metro Éireann, the Irish film industry made official its co-production partnership with South Africa in Cannes last year. South Africa is Africa’s strongest film nation, and it is a French-South African co-production that has the honour of closing this year’s festival.
Zulu is a crime thriller with socio-political overtones starring Forest Whitaker and Orlando Bloom as Cape Town cops partnering up to solve a murder. Bloom plays Epkeen, an Afrikaans officer, while Whitaker plays Ali Sokhela who, as a child, was the only one of his family to escape an Inkatha massacre. Together they now face the modern dangers facing their nation.
Séamas McSwiney is an Irish journalist living and working in Paris.
