What happens at Cannes

Le Festival de Cannes​ was inaugurated in 1939 to coincide with – and compete with – the Venice Film Festival. The previous year, Leni Riefenstahl had been awarded the Mussolini Cup for Olympia, leading the American representative on the jury to leave the ceremony in protest. Cannes was chosen in the hope that the festival would revive its appeal as a luxury destination, which had floundered after the Great Depression (in this respect the festival has been largely successful). But the first festival was cancelled after only one screening (William Dieterle’s Hunchback of Notre Dame): Hitler had just invaded Poland. Two days later, France declared war on Germany. In 1946, backed by a socialist mayor, Raymond Picaud, and funded by the Confédération Générale du Travail (which still sits on the board, to little effect) and local unions – restaurateurs, hoteliers and even bakers – and following a huge reconstruction effort by hundreds of volunteers, the festival was reinaugurated.

The press release announced the 1946 festival as a ‘big show of friendship between nations’, with the emphasis on diplomacy and the promotion of ‘freedom’ rather than artistry. Its funding structure meant that Cannes was originally described as a ‘state festival’; invitations were sent out by the French government and political delegations from different nations attended, much as they would a political summit. Until the mid-1970s, films were submitted by countries, and countries, rather than filmmakers, won the awards. Any country could object to films in competition on the grounds of poor ‘national sentiments’. Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) – one of the first cinematic reflections on the Holocaust, filmed in the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek – was censored by the Gaullist secretary of state for industry and commerce, Maurice Lemaire, who considered its presentation in an ‘atmosphere of international festivity … sovereignly inappropriate’. It played out of competition, but this didn’t stop the German delegation leaving the festival in protest.

Some form of disruption looms over the festival every year. Unionised electricity workers, reacting to Macron’s proposed pension reforms, threatened to cut power to venues in 2023, and last year festival workers, organising under the banner of Sous les écrans la dèche (Broke behind the Screens), threatened to withhold their labour until they were given the same rights as other culture workers. Any dispute that threatens the smooth running of the festival makes international headlines. Last year, there were rumours that the left-leaning news site Mediapart was about to publish a list of ten French actors and directors guilty of sexual violence. Mediapart has carried some high-profile investigations into sexual misconduct, including the affaire Depardieu (on the first day of this year’s festival, he was given a suspended sentence for sexually assaulting two women on set in 2021). The festival leadership held crisis meetings and was readying to remove the films of the offending directors and actors from the programme when it was revealed that the list was a scam, created by a far-right account on X.

Protests and symbols of protest are banned from the red carpet and on and around the Croisette, the boulevard that runs along the coast. Issues that pertain to work, or are deemed exclusively French, are quietly handed over to the ministries of labour and culture or the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, one of the public funders of the festival. Subjects that have in recent years attracted wider criticism – notably the issue of representation – have been taken up by the délégué général, Thierry Frémaux, and the festival president, Iris Knobloch, as metrics of Cannes’s ability to modernise. This has resulted in some weak announcements of supposed milestones: ‘For the first time in sixty years, two women succeed each other in the role of jury president’ (Juliette Binoche, following Greta Gerwig). The jury, which decides on the Palme d’Or and other prizes, had had an equal division of women and men for the past decade, but the number of women filmmakers in the Official Selection fluctuates. Where it has increased in recent years, this is often due to the inclusion of films directed by French or Hollywood actresses.

I spent the fortnight before this year’s festival reading Frémaux’s 620-page Sélection officielle, an account of the year leading up to the 2016 festival, or as the publisher’s blurb has it, ‘a year in the life of a bulimic who loves to love’. On the cover, Frémaux stands on the red steps leading up to the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in the pouring rain, umbrella in hand – a little wink to Gene Kelly. The show will go on! His selection grows larger every year (so, too, does the number of films being produced). He has added the Cannes Classics section – for restorations of heritage works, the only reliable strand to the programme – and Cannes Premiere, the function of which nobody quite understands. Always competing with rival festivals, and with parallel, independently programmed sections (Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight), the official festival uses these strands as a way of laying claim to the greatest number of films and of limiting criticism about what isn’t included. (Not always successfully: last year, it transpired that Frémaux had rejected Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, a far superior film to most in competition). I’ve heard disgruntled French critics call Frémaux the ‘Kim Jong-un of the Riviera’. He is reported to display despotic tendencies and there is nothing to prevent him from staying in the role for as long as he likes (though every year is rumoured to be his last).

Frémaux seems to like reading. In Sélection officielle, he cites Salman Rushdie, Stendhal and Charlie Hebdo, but also Anna Akhmatova and Flannery O’Connor. His interests include football, Bruce Springsteen and the city of Lyon, where he grew up. He takes judo seriously enough to have written a book about it. He is an obsessive cyclist: he claims that it is when cycling that the choice of films becomes clear to him. While the invited members of the jury and filmmakers ride around in blacked-out Renaults – one of the big sponsors of the festival – Frémaux zips between screenings, red carpet photo ops, grand dinners and parties on his bike. Two years ago, a video was published of him shouting at the police as they attempted to fine him for riding on the pavement. He was apparently on his way to pay a late-night visit to Quentin Tarantino at the Carlton.

Born in 1960, Frémaux comes from the ‘old cinephilia’, which seems to be one of the things people like about him: ‘He didn’t have the training people in these positions have now. He is not a son of . . . He didn’t go to Sciences Po or a business school,’ the manager of a Paris cinema told me. ‘He’s not a technocrat. His schooling was the cinema.’ In Sélection officielle, Frémaux remembers suiting up (as is obligatory) as a young man to sit in the worst section of the 2300-seat palais, with the ‘lumpenproletariat of film lovers’.

Frémaux may not be a technocrat, but when I asked fellow film critics at Cannes how they would describe him, the most common responses were ‘politician’ and ‘diplomat’. One Australian programmer compared him to ‘a sales rep for Cartier watches’. At the much anticipated press conference where the selection is announced, Frémaux lists the titles he has chosen, followed by a short teaser. This exercise often feels laborious, as he falls back on old anecdotes from past festivals. It is a joke in the French industry that Frémaux has been handed cue cards and is ‘discovering’ the selection at the same time as his audience.

Late additions to the programme are announced in the month leading up to the festival. This year, one addition passed almost everyone by: ‘Ukraine Day’, which took place a day before the festival began in earnest. It featured the premiere of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Notre Guerre, a documentary which follows the Nouveau Philosophe playboy to the front and into Zelensky’s office. BHL is an outspoken defender of Israel, Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and is currently under investigation for receiving significant funding from the TV channel Arte while serving on its supervisory board. He is a regular at Cannes.

Whenever Frémaux is asked about the political position of the festival, he replies with a variation on: ‘Le cinéma, rien que le cinéma.’ In Sélection officielle, he is more blunt: ‘A festival is only the reflection of the situation globally … Making Cannes the scapegoat for the problem does no one any good.’ Ukraine has proved an exception. Less than a week after Russia’s invasion in 2022, the festival announced that it would not welcome Russian delegations. Zelensky was livestreamed at the opening ceremony to remind us of cinema’s power to change the world. That year – in less than two months – the festival managed to find and programme a handful of Ukrainian films. At BHL’s premiere this year, Ukrainian soldiers were invited on stage in their fatigues and Frémaux held up one end of the Ukrainian flag. After selecting a film starring Johnny Depp to open the 2023 festival, Frémaux went on TV to insist he knew nothing of Depp’s trial for assaulting Amber Heard. He was wearing a blue and yellow badge emblazoned with the words ‘STOP THE WAR’.

The contradiction between the festival’s support for Ukraine and its silence on Palestine is, of course, ‘only the reflection of the situation globally’. But it does try to stay relevant. At last year’s press conference, Yolande Zauberman’s La Belle de Gaza was the first film Frémaux announced and it was clear from his speech that he considered it the perfect neutral object: a film about trans Palestinians in Tel Aviv, by a Jewish director, made long before 7 October. A glowing review in the German press encapsulated the film’s perspective that ‘Israel is the only state in the Middle East committed to freedom, democracy and human rights.’

On​ 16 April, the Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, who had just turned 25, was murdered with ten members of her family at their home in Gaza. A day before, ACID (L’Association du cinéma indépendant pour sa diffusion) – the third and smallest section at Cannes, programmed by a committee of filmmakers – had announced its selection. It included Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, a documentary about Hassona by the French-Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi. A 17-page report on Hassona’s death, which served as a corrective to the military’s claims that the attack had targeted ‘a Hamas member’, was published on the first day of the festival. Its analysis indicated that Hassona’s house ‘was targeted using precision-guided munitions, equipped with guidance and control systems – including GPS and a delay fuse – designed to detonate at specific co-ordinates and floor level’. Following ACID’s lead, a statement was published on the festival website, expressing ‘deep sorrow’ at the ‘tragedy’ of Hassona’s death and describing her as one of the ‘far too many victims of the violence that has engulfed the region for months’. There was no mention of Israel. On the eve of the festival, an open letter was published in Libération denouncing the silence and hypocrisy of the film industry and noting that a similar silence had followed the attack on Hamdan Ballal – one of the directors of the documentary No Other Land – by Israeli settlers barely three weeks after the film won an Academy Award. It was signed by Mike Leigh, Pedro Almodóvar, Susan Sarandon and others.

At the opening ceremony the next day, Juliette Binoche took centre stage. Her outfit, an off-white crepe ensemble, had apparently taken couturiers at Dior – whose parent company, LVMH, invests hundreds of millions in Israeli companies – two hundred hours to make. In her speech, she listed the problems of the world: war, poverty, climate change, misogyny, the 7 October hostages, prisoners and refugees and those who have drowned (presumably while trying to seek refuge in Europe). She then paid tribute to Hassona, again without mentioning Israel, and recited one of her poems. At the press conference afterwards, Binoche was asked why she hadn’t signed the letter in Libération. She hesitated before answering with a coy smile: ‘You will maybe understand it a little later … I cannot answer you.’ The next day, she signed the letter without making any public comment.

Farsi had hoped Hassona would be at Cannes. In the film’s final scene, which was added after Hassona’s death and is announced by the title card ‘The Last Conversation’, Farsi asks if Hassona has heard of Cannes, before revealing the news of the film’s selection. She asks if Hassona wants to attend. Hassona says, tentatively, that she does. Farsi asks whether, now that the film is public, she might want to ‘move … somewhere else’. Hassona replies, as she has throughout the film, that Gaza is where her family and her memories are and that they have ‘no other land but Gaza’. The film was a compromise: Farsi had gone to Cairo in December 2023, imagining that she might gain access to Rafah; this was impossible, but she met a Palestinian refugee who put her in touch with Hassona. They spoke regularly for the best part of a year; Farsi’s recordings of their video calls – each woman in her digital square – form the backbone of the film. The difficulties of maintaining contact (glitching and the word ‘reconnecting’ feature heavily in the finished film) don’t detract from the women’s rapport. Hassona is charismatic and articulate. She quotes The Shawshank Redemption and talks about learning Morse code. She is a realist, but her faith in her people and in Allah is unshakeable. I wish, though, that Farsi had allowed her to finish talking about chocolate and the museums she wanted to visit in Rome, rather than redirecting the conversation to ask why she wore a hijab or whether Gazans support Hamas.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk was shown on the second day of the festival. People queued around the block, some wearing keffiyehs; no ACID film had drawn such a crowd before and the organisers looked nervous and excited. It was uncomfortable to remember that all this activity – the scores of people queuing to see the film, the buyers working out how to market it – would not have happened had it not been for Hassona’s death. I was reminded of an Instagram post that circulated in the industry in autumn 2023: ‘In two years, your opening films and your special selections will all be about the brave people of Palestine. You will come up with special categories of awards … and some of you will be praised for your bold and forward programming and inclusivity.’

One Israeli film, Mama, was part of the Official Selection. Most critics expected to see another, Yes by the director Nadav Lapid, the enfant terrible of Israeli cinema. When news of the film’s omission emerged, the unofficial explanation seemed to be that it was too long and had been sent to Frémaux too late. Later, when it was announced that the film would be shown in the Directors’ Fortnight, the story changed: Yes was too politically ‘dangerous’ for the Official Selection.

Lapid’s is the sort of cinema that, by design, makes you feel dirty watching it. His previous two films featured troubled male protagonists, who Lapid admitted were thinly veiled versions of himself, though their short tempers and ‘toxic masculine’ traits were to be interpreted as symptoms of the sickness gripping Israeli society. Yes had been announced during Cannes in 2023 as one of the five annual recipients of Israel Film Fund financing, to the tune of around £500,000. But the film’s focus had changed considerably: ‘Israel, in the aftermath of 7 October. Y, a jazz musician struggling to make ends meet, and his wife, Jasmine, a dancer, sell their art, souls and bodies to the elite, and bring pleasure and consolation to a bleeding nation. Soon, Y is given a mission of the highest importance: setting to music a bloodthirsty new national anthem.’

The film has a three-part structure. The first is classic Lapid: outrageous, hyperbolic, supercharged. There is vomit and blood; ears are licked out and lines of coke snorted from naked buttocks. There are heavy visual metaphors: the film ends with a bootlicking orgy and, in the middle section, the protagonist slips on a banana skin in the desert and wipes his bleeding knee with the paper on which he has written the new anthem.

In the more meditative, melancholic middle section, Y leaves the decadence and vulgarity of Tel Aviv to visit his former girlfriend, Leah (played by Lapid’s wife, Naama Preis). Gaza, which so far has only existed for Y as a couple of notifications on his phone, is now seen up close. Leah, a pianist and interpreter, has been ‘redeployed in propaganda’, where she must translate ‘into six languages the horror we suffered’ on 7 October. As they drive to the border with Gaza on a whim, she tells Y that she has heard that in Gaza starving dogs are eating human remains. When he asks her about 7 October, she goes into a sort of trance, reciting several highly graphic accounts of burning, raping and murder. Later, against the sound of bombing and with smoke rising from Gaza, the two kiss and discuss what they would name a child. It is the first time Y displays any real reflection. Then they leave the border zone. ‘It’s not smart to stay too long,’ Leah tells him. ‘If we can see Gaza, Gaza can see us.’

‘It’s very hard to make a film when missiles and bombs are falling around you,’ Lapid said of the shoot. Unlike Hassona, however, he had the choice to film far away from bombs and missiles. His anecdotes about the danger his crew experienced were unimpressive: ‘Five minutes after we started shooting, the army began to circle around us and the commander ordered his team to send someone over to stop it. Luckily, the officer he sent was a cinephile and ended up saying “yes” and disobeying his commander.’ Although Lapid lives in Paris, he benefits from the independently managed, but publicly funded, Israel Film Fund, and also receives financing from the Israel Film Council and the Ministry of Culture and Sports. Security had been increased for his screening, but what was there to fear? The audience applauded ecstatically.

Running along the marina and around the port is the international village, a series of furnished tents that state-affiliated institutions can sponsor. Furthest to the west was the Israeli pavilion, its flag visible from the beach and Croisette. On the other side of the port was the Palestinian pavilion. I spoke to Mohanad Yaqubi, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Institute, which was created to facilitate participation at the Cannes Marché, where the business of film is done. All workers at the PFI are voluntary. Yaqubi told me that its name and structure were inspired by the PLO’s Palestine Film Unit. The institute was founded in 2018, which felt significant: it marked fifty years since filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard travelled to Cannes to shut down the festival, in solidarity with the general strike and protesters in Paris. Two years later, in 1970, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin made Jusqu’à la victoire, Godard’s first film about the Palestinian cause.

I asked Yaqubi why participating in Cannes is important. ‘Controlling the narrative is not just a matter of writing it,’ he said. ‘It’s not about also shying away or saying we don’t want to speak. Solidarity is work.’ The films on the PFI website have been screened at bars, restaurants and social clubs. ‘In my research,’ Yaqubi told me, ‘I’ve found copies of Palestinian films from the 1960s and 1970s all over the world. This is a network outside of the industry that we must reactivate … And I think our quest is important because we’re not only trying to make a profit; we’re trying to change realities.’ The PFI offers advice to Palestinian filmmakers on ‘how to pitch, how to keep your messaging, where you can get your funding, how to draw up contracts’; it also supports non-Palestinian filmmakers working on Palestinian stories. Again, this goes back to the 1960s, when many militant directors made films about Palestine. ‘These are part of our history too,’ Yaqubi said.

Iarrived​ in Cannes with a terrible line from Sélection officielle ringing in my head: ‘To paraphrase Woody Allen,’ Frémaux writes, ‘Cannes is like sex: even when it’s not good, it’s good.’ No one is immune to a degree of corniness when it comes to Cannes. David Lynch’s Cannes Diary, a ten-part series of short missives documenting his experience as jury president in 2002, is primarily a vehicle for him to indulge his love of café au lait, pain au chocolat, baguette avec fromage and vin rouge. He praises the French as ‘the greatest lovers of art and protectors of art in the world’ and looks on everything with childish wonder. That wonder extends to the theatres, where audiences clap and cheer at the tacky festival animation, in which the red staircase floats up into the sky. In Lynch’s words: ‘Everybody knows about carpet. And everybody knows the colour red. So you put those two things together and you get red carpet. But there’s nothing like the red carpet at Cannes.’

Was this Cannes as good as bad sex? Bad sex is usually short. At Cannes, screenings run from 8.30 a.m. to past midnight. If you are a programmer or distributor, it’s typical to watch as many as six films a day. Members of the press rush off to file their reviews or record their podcast ‘takes’. Tickets are released at 7 a.m., four days before each screening, and disappear in seconds. It’s common for screenings to be illuminated by dots of light, as people try to book one film while watching another.

Many of the Americans I spoke to seemed happy to be at Cannes – or, at any rate, happy not to be in the US. A week earlier, the National Endowment for the Arts had sent out notices of grant terminations and withdrawals to dozens of non-profit arts organisations including film festivals. A few days before that, on Truth Social, Trump had announced a 100 per cent tariff on movies produced outside the country. Whether this will materialise, and what it would look like, is anyone’s guess, but a New York indie producer confided that Trump’s ‘Hollywood ambassador’ Jon Voight had promised ‘some good things too’: the possibility of a new tax credit, production treaties with other countries (at the moment, the US has none) and fin-syn (financial interest and syndication) rules, abolished under the Clinton administration, which would allow producers to retain rights to, and profit from, content produced for networks and streaming services. The French looked less happy: ‘You see all the same faces as you see in Paris,’ one producer told me, ‘most of whom you try to avoid.’

Trade journalists and the mainstream press found little to adore but a lot to like. The films that divided opinion last year – Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez – were more explosive, and much more obvious contenders for the Academy Awards, than anything in competition this year. But, against all odds, business was back. Mubi dropped $24 million on Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, double what it paid for The Substance. (At the start of June, it emerged that Mubi had accepted a $100 million investment from Sequoia Capital, which has boasted of the profits it’s made in Israel since 7 October.)

Die My Love is an Americanised adaptation of the novel of the same name by the Argentinian writer Ariana Harwicz and stars Jennifer Lawrence as a new mother who begins to fall apart after she and her partner (Robert Pattinson) move from New York to rural Montana. The photography is close and jittery and the sound claustrophobic. It has been described as a film ‘about’ postpartum depression, but it is far from being an issue film in the way that might suggest – the protagonist’s ability to keep mothering is one of the interesting things about it. Ramsay is a great filmmaker, but Die My Love was a disappointment. It was also one of several films that could have been made fifty years ago (critics have compared Lawrence to Gena Rowlands in A Woman under the Influence). I kept wondering, why this film now?

Invoking the recent past can be even worse. Eddington, the director Ari Aster’s first film at Cannes, is a misjudged pandemic drama that follows a Covid-denying sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and his battle to overthrow the progressive Latino mayor (Pedro Pascal) of a small New Mexico town in spring 2020, as his deranged wife (Emma Stone) and mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) fall for conspiracy theories. The gilets jaunes protests are the backdrop to Dominik Moll’s Dossier 137, which follows an officer at the police inspectorate, played by Léa Drucker, who is investigating police violence against protesters. Moll tries to incorporate a range of perspectives – the otherwise apolitical working class who fear for their public services, a Black hotel maid who highlights systemic racism – but ends up on the side of his overly sympathetic protagonist, who is attacked by all parties despite, or even because of, her conscientiousness.

More demanding and cinephilic critics found the line-up disappointing. They like to reminisce about 2021, when the films in competition included Leos Carax’s Annette, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, Nadav Lapid’s Knee and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria. That was the last great Cannes. This year, there was a small furore when it was pointed out that the popular German auteur Christian Petzold had used the same Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons song that a Portuguese auteur had used a few years before and a French auteur a few years before that; but the critics were madder still that Richard Linklater had dared to make a film about Jean-Luc Godard. Even worse, a narrative film about the shoot of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, considered one of the all-time greats. I didn’t find it sacrilegious, but it was a bit much watching the film at Cannes. It was too easy to imagine Linklater thinking of the red carpet as he wrote these lines for Godard: ‘I’d happily cop Les Quatre Cents Coups to see the film at Cannes. It’s disgusting, everyone is at Cannes. Everyone!’ But Nouvelle Vague is not a hubristic film: it is ‘small’ in the image of Godard at the time. Nor is it the pastiche it has been accused of being. It’s a gag a minute, when one every ten would have sufficed. But its mockery of Godard – who exhausts his collaborators with his whims and rhythm and is never without his sunglasses – is born of admiration. And it challenges the image of the auteur, with Linklater emphasising the role of Godard’s crew. There was a pleasing absurdity to watching this at Cannes, spiritual home of auteurism.

Some of the Godard character’s aphorisms (it’s unclear how much of his dialogue is invented, but all of it seems plausible) came back to me when considering the rest of the Official Selection, not least: ‘You should never adapt a book to the cinema; you should adapt the cinema to a book.’ There seemed to be more adaptations than in recent years. I knew nothing about Kristen Stewart’s first feature before seeing it, except that it was popular: when I arrived for the screening, the manager of the Salle Debussy was telling anguished Gen Z fans there would be no last-minute tickets. ‘I just want to see Kristen!’ one girl sobbed. ‘You are here to see a work of art,’ the manager replied sternly, ‘not the maker.’ (The auteur is indeed dead?) Chronology of Water is messy, needlessly experimental and overindulgent in places, but Stewart is a good director of actors and there’s an excellent cameo by Kim Gordon playing a dominatrix. The film diligently follows its source material, Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, in which a competitive swimmer turns to heroin to cope with childhood abuse before being saved by literature. There are lines like: ‘I’m not speaking out of my asshole when I say this – come into the water and let it hold you.’ If only Stewart had chosen better material.

Love Me Tender, another supposedly transgressive film, is a defanged and somewhat desexed adaptation of Constance Debré’s autobiographical novel, directed by Anna Cazenave Cambet. The film focuses on the narrator’s custody battle over her son, while her sexual escapades and arbitrary cruelty (which are central to the book) are here rendered as symptoms of her tireless mission as mère courage. The notion of literary adaptation is dealt with in the laziest imaginable way: scenes of Vicky Krieps at her laptop, with a voiceover of lines from the book.

Debré wasn’t the only French lesbian writer to have her work showcased at Cannes this year. Hafsia Herzi’s film La Petite Dernière is an adaptation of Fatima Daas’s slim book of the same title, which caused a stir on publication five years ago: autofiction by a 25-year-old Muslim lesbian from the banlieue! Herzi turns the novel, which is fragmented and intentionally repetitive, into a conventional year-in-the-life story which more than once juxtaposes a scene of nocturnal lesbian sex with morning prayers at the mosque. The fact that the protagonist is writing a novel is dropped into the penultimate scene. But this wasn’t the most embarrassing film about a writer to be shown at Cannes. That accolade goes to Mario Martone’s Fuori, which uses Goliarda Sapienza as a vehicle for a Sapphic prison drama. I left after an hour, during the scene in which three hot women (all former prisoners) take a shower together; up to that point, the only nod to Sapienza’s work was a ten-second shot of the manuscript of The Art of Joy with a male voice admonishing it as ‘too long, too traditional’.

The winner of the Palme d’Or came as little surprise to anyone. A photograph from Cannes 2010 had resurfaced online, showing Binoche receiving her Best Actress award (for her performance in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy) and holding up a piece of paper bearing Jafar Panahi’s name. Binoche spoke at length during that Cannes about her love for Iran, which she has visited several times: in one story she is chased by a group of women in ‘burqas’ who adore her films. She was credited, mostly in France, with Panahi’s release from prison later that year. It Was Just an Accident is a road movie of sorts – an Iranian genre par excellence – about a man’s chance encounter with his former prison torturer. It’s a tense political film, with the familiar dark humour, absurdism and dialectical approach of Iranian cinema, as the characters discuss revenge v. ‘living with’ the aftermath of torture. Western critics often adopt a different tone of voice to talk about filmmakers such as Panahi, breathlessly praising his bravery and how humbling it was to be in the same theatre as him in Cannes. They take his ‘banned’ status to mean that he cannot legally make films in Iran, but in fact it means that he can’t work with the state (not that he would want to) or access state funding, and he can’t get a licence to film in public places or screen his films publicly. The festival can be jarringly self-congratulatory, but it also has real power: the decision to include a particular film makes a dissident director into a celebrity, which gives them a level of protection in their home country.

Despite everything, it was a subdued Cannes. On the second day, a woman denounced the vice-president of ACID for sexual aggression (his page was swiftly removed from ACID’s website) and an actor in Dossier 137 was denounced for sexual assault (he was removed from the red carpet). The next day, a small gust of wind caused a palm tree to plummet onto the Croisette, seriously injuring the producer of a Japanese film that had premiered the day before. Mia Schem, a French-Israeli woman captured by Hamas on 7 October, walked the red carpet. But no one seemed to be talking about these events.

The most important conversations, about policy and politics, are confined to the Marché or VIP spaces such as the Centre national du cinéma beach. I wonder whether they included discussion of filmmaking closer to home. Following a campaign by the Rassemblement National, the Région Sud has begun to cancel funding for films considered to have a leftist agenda (projects, for example, that evoke the ‘Israeli Occupation’). The French far right has in recent years mobilised bots and fake accounts – as well as its followers – to target films on the website AlloCiné (the French IMDb), which has millions of users in France. Films that critique the police or portray the banlieue in anything other than an unflattering light end up with extremely low average ratings (one or two stars) and are then quickly deprogrammed from cinemas. Even Cannes risks being criticised as ‘woke’ for including films such as Dossier 137 and La Petite Dernière.

I’d left Cannes by the time I read about the power cut that affected the last day of the festival. Later, a group of anarchists posted an anonymous statement on the website Indymedia announcing that they had sabotaged the region’s main electrical supply. The reasons for their action included Cannes’s participation in ‘culture-washing’; the horror of hosting a glamorous film festival on the Mediterranean, described by the group as a ‘cemetery of refugees’; French arms exports fuelling wars ‘from Yemen to Gaza, from Ukraine to Sahel’, and the presence locally of the Thales Alenia Space headquarters and some of its industrial sites, which produce satellites and other telecommunication and surveillance technologies. The power cut hit the town badly. Ice-cream parlours lost all their ice cream, ATMs went down, trains were halted, traffic lights malfunctioned and buildings with electronic locks were rendered inaccessible. Unfortunately for the anarchists, the palais has its own backup generator: one film was interrupted for twenty minutes (apparently much to the amusement of the audience) and the closing ceremony went off without a hitch. The show goes on.