Séamas McSwiney takes a look at some of the global offerings at this year’s 62nd Cannes Film Festival
The French Riviera city of Cannes is the most multicultural place on earth during its annual film festival. While Hollywood may be the world capital of the film industry, it is equally true to say that Cannes – for 12 days each May – is the capital of world cinema in all its diversity.
Cannes thrives on showcasing the art and culture of cinema, opening a window to alternative perspectives. It is an antidote to the domination of the Hollywood entertainment model because it promotes the idea that cinema is not just an industry, it is also a reflection of culture, identity and artistic ambition.
Most films that play in Cannes will not be found in your local multiplex. The diversity is therefore a breath of fresh air when it comes to cultivating cultural choice.
Each year about 100 films are invited from nations around the world to participate in the various prestige sections, including the select 20 that compete for the famous Palme d’Or. As many as a 1,000 other films also travel to the Cannes Market in search of distribution deals and foreign sales.
At least as many projects for future films are there too, with filmmakers and producers alike pounding the pavement and arranging meetings in search of financing. The first half of a film producer’s job is getting a film made; the second half is getting it seen. Both happen at Cannes.
Last year’s big winner was the French film Entre Les Murs (The Class), a thoroughly engaging film that chronicled daily life in a multi-ethnic secondary school in Paris. Other prizes went to films from Italy, Turkey and Belgium. In 2007, the top prize went to a compelling Romanian film called 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a social drama that focused on the underside of life in the communist Romania of the 1980s.
In 2006, the Palme d’Or went to a British/Irish/Euro-pean co-production, The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Directed by Ken Loach and starring Cillian Murphy, the harrowing story takes place in west Cork during the Irish war of independence and the ensuing civil war in the early 1920s.
This year’s competition crop is as culturally eclectic as usual, with films coming from as far afield as Japan, Hong Kong and the Philippines. There is the usual handful of French films but surprisingly few from the USA this year – only Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock and Quentin Taran-tino’s Inglorious Basterds are of note. The latter tells the tale of a squad of Jewish commandos and features one of the few stars in this year’s selection, Brad Pitt.
But never fear, as many other stars will appear for the nightly climb up the red-carpeted steps of the Palais des Festivals.
Many films featured at Cannes are production hybrids with funding coming from several places, notably between European countries and among Asian financers. This year also sees several east/west cross-cultural stories: a Spanish film by Isabelle Coixet set in Tokyo; a Taiwanese film set between Taipei and Paris by Tsai Ming Liang; and controversial French director Gaspar Noé’s supernatural tale of a dead French drug dealer in Tokyo.
Palestine provides The Time that Remains by Elia Suleiman which is, in his own words, “a semi-biographic film, in four historic episodes, about a family – my family – spanning from 1948 until recent times.”
African cinema is a rarer breed, but finds mention with an official screening of Souleymane Cisse’s Min Ye… (Tell me who you are) from Mali, recounting the trials and tribulations of a polygamous bourgeois family in Yaoundé.
This year’s festival also honours the celebrated Burkinabé actor and griot Sotigui Kouyaté. In February of this year Kouyaté won the Best Actor award at the Berlin Film Festival and at Cannes he will be decorated Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture.
Cinema across the world is an open forum where culture is reflected and conserved. The Cannes festival is its celebration.
