The film festival has always combined glitz and politics, but, amid the war in Ukraine, the decision to screen a zombie comedy as the opening film and stage a "Top Gun" stunt highlight the dissonance.
An activist on the Cannes red carpet had bodypaint on her chest in the colors of the Ukrainian flag that read: 'Stop raping us'Image: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
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This year's Cannes has been a tale of two festivals. The 75th Festival de Cannes has delivered on its promise to "bring back cinema" after the ravages of COVID with a joyous, maskless celebration of movies and the people who make them.
The red carpets have been full, the parties raucous and the films — from Tom Cruise's blockbuster "Top Gun: Maverick" to Cristian Mungiu's small-town Romanian drama "R.M.N." — have shown the full range of what cinema can do.
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Protests on the red carpet
But the uglier realities of the world, including the brutal war in Ukraine, have continued to intrude on the celebrations.
At the world premiere of George Miller's "Three Thousand Years of Longing," a 1,001-Night-style adult fairy tale starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, a woman stripped nearly naked on the red carpet to reveal the colors of the Ukrainian flag, with the words "Stop Raping Us" painted on her chest.
Cannes 2022: Cinema in the shadow of war
The extravaganza on the French Riviera has a wide variety of films to offer this year, from zombie thrillers to love stories. As expected, films from Ukraine are getting special attention.
Image: Tobias Hase/dpa/picture alliance
Solidarity with Ukraine
The organizers of the film festival, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary, are showing solidarity with Ukraine following the Russian invasion of the country. The festival's director excluded all official Russian participants except dissident Kirill Serebrennikov, the sole Russian film director who is presenting his film at the competition.
Image: Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP/picture alliance
A film from Russia: 'Tchaikovsky's Wife'
Serebrennikov's film, "Tchaikovsky's Wife" was included in the competition on the grounds that the director did not receive any official support from Russia, that he was under house arrest in his home country and has been living in Germany since his release. The film tells the story of the famous composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who married a young woman in order to hide his homosexuality.
Image: Kirill Serebrennikov/Hype Film, 2022
Ukrainian directors taking part
Sergei Loznitsa is perhaps Ukraine's best-known film director. His film, "The Natural History of Destruction," will be shown in Cannes but not as part of the competition. His younger contemporary, Maksym Nakonechnyi's "Butterfly Vision" narrates a "hard, surreal story of a fighter, the pilot Lilja." Nakonechnyi is still shooting in Ukraine, carrying a gun for self-defense.
Image: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/picture alliance
War on celluloid
Director Mathieu Vadepied has dedicated his film, "Father & Soldier" to a historical war. A Senegalese father signs up for the army in 1917, after his 17-year-old son is forced to fight in World War I for France. French actor Omar Sy, known for his role in Netflix's "Lupin," plays the father.
Image: Marie-Clémence David-2022/Unité/ Korokoro/Gaumont/France 3 Cinéma/Mille Soleils/Sypossible Africa
'Elvis' at Cannes
Australian director Baz Luhrmann is known for his extravagant movies, including "Moulin Rouge" and "Romeo + Juliet." Luhrmann is now presenting a biopic of Elvis Presley that is not part of the competition. The singing sensation is played by US actor Austin Butler.
Image: Prod.DB/IMAGO
Head of the jury
Last year, American director Spike Lee headed the jury. This year, French actor Vincent Lindon takes over the reins. Last year, he played the male lead in "Titane," which won the prestigious Palme d'Or. Lindon himself was awarded the prize for best actor in 2015 for his role in "The Measure of a Man."
Image: Daniel Fouray/dpa/MAXPPP/picture alliance
A humorous opening
This year's festival will open with the zombie comedy "Coupez!", or "Final Cut", by the French director Michel Hazanavicius. This film is not competing for any award. The director featured family members in his film. In this picture, actor Lyes Salem (left) can be seen with the director's niece Raika Hazanavicius (middle) and daughter Simone Hazanavicius (right).
Image: Filmfest Cannes/dpa/picture alliance
Famous faces in the running
The directors at the competition in Cannes are renowned: Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (pictured) won the Palme d'Or in 2018 for "Shoplifters." His Korean counterpart Park Chan-wook, as well as Canadian director David Cronenberg and Sweden's Ruben Östlund, are participating in the competition.
Twenty-one films are taking part of the competition, but only four were directed by women. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (pictured) is competing with her film "Forever Young," while Leonor Serraille is presenting a story of migration from the Ivory Coast to France in her film "Mother and Son." Claire Denis narrates the story of a couple in Nicaragua in her film, "Stars at Noon."
Image: Marco Provvisionato / ipa-agency/picture alliance
'Showing Up'
American director Kelly Reichardt is one of the four women directors in this year's competition. Her comedy "Showing Up" tells the story of a sculptor who must deal with the irritations of daily life while struggling with opening her exhibition. Michelle Williams (pictured) plays the main role.
Image: A4/Film Science
Discarding the corset
The "Un Certain Regard" category this year features Austrian director Marie Kreutzer's film "Corsage." It tells the story of the 19th century Austrian Queen Elisabeth, also known as "Sisi," who revolted against the prescribed corset and the royal expectation that she should always look young, thin and beautiful.
Image: Manuel Romano/NurPhoto/picture alliance
A woman's story
There are no German entries this year, but the Berlin-born German-French-Iranian director Emily Atef is participating in the "Un Certain Regard" category with "More Than Ever." Her film tells the story of a woman in her 30s living a satisfied life in Bordeaux until she is diagnosed with lung cancer.
Image: Tobias Hase/dpa/picture alliance
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Two days later, at the premiere of Ali Abbasi's "Holy Spider," a story of a prostitute-murdering serial killer in Iran, a dozen women stopped on the red carpet steps, held up canisters of black smoke and unfurled a long banner listing the names of the 129 known women who were brutally murdered in France since the last Cannes Film Festival in July last year.
Fighter jets for the 'Top Gun' premiere
At the "Top Gun: Maverick" premiere, a squadron of French fighter jets roared over the red carpet, a thunderous advertisement for the Hollywood action movie that, like the 1986 original, is slick, entertaining propaganda for the American military industrial complex.
The 'Top Gun' publicity stunt felt a bit too real for some people at the film festivalImage: Daniel Cole/AP/picture alliance
But for many on the ground, it was terrifying. Some diners, among them filmmakers from Ukraine, ducked in terror under their tables, convinced they were about to be bombed.
A clash of glitz, Zelenskyy and zombies
The Cannes Festival has tried to straddle the divide, providing cinema's biggest party while still acknowledging the misery away from the Croisette.
During the opening night ceremonies, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared via a live video call from Kyiv, telling the room of filmmakers and journalists "it is necessary for cinema not to be silent" and that Ukraine "will win this war."
Once the ceremony was concluded, the festival kicked off with the premiere of "Final Cut," a French-language zombie comedy. It was borderline schizophrenic.
Red carpet fashion is always a Cannes highlight. Here, French model Frederique BelImage: STEPHANE MAHE/REUTERS
Another such moment came at the premiere of "Triangle of Sadness." In Ruben Östlund's crude (but very funny) capitalism satire, a yacht full of the super-rich goes down at sea, stranding its passengers on a desert island. The ship's maid, the only one who knows how to fish and make fire, suddenly finds herself at the top of the social pecking order. It's a favorite for the Cannes' best film prize, the Palme d'Or.
But watching the movie amid a privileged crowd of gowned and tuxedoed elites was an exercise in social dissonance.
As was speaking to Ukrainian filmmakers in Cannes, many of whom had been on the frontlines of the war before taking time out to fly to France and discuss their movies, and, inevitably, the state of their country.
Sitting in the noon sun, on a balcony overlooking the Cannes harbor, director Maksym Nakonechnyi calmly discussed his drama "Butterfly Vision," playing in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section, which looks at female Ukraine soldiers who struggle with PTSD after their return from the front.
He acknowledged the strangeness of being at the world's most glamorous film festival while, miles away, his homeland is struggling for its very survival. But he said all of Cannes' glitz could serve a greater purpose, if it focuses attention on Ukrainian stories.
'Butterfly Vision' offers an all-too-timely testimony to the female soldiers of Ukraine Image: Butterfly Vision
"It's important for us to be here, for Ukrainian films and Ukrainian stories to be seen and heard," he said. "Before this war, the Ukrainian perspective was marginalized or ignored, there was this false perception of us as just a part of a bigger, post-Soviet cultural field. Of course, that was the result of Russian propaganda. That's over now. There is no way back. The process has started where the world has begun to see us as a sovereign identity with all the aspects that entails: cultural, political, sociological, existential and metaphysical. A Ukraine with a separate post-colonial identity."
