This year’s selection for the Cannes Film Festival includes possibly the largest number of Arab, African and Asian films in the storied event’s history. This isn’t just mere tokenism: The festival’s artistic director Thierry Fremaux and his fellow programmers have clearly cast their eye to new territories as they fight the notion that cinema is in crisis.
At the press conference announcing the official selection, Fremaux told the watching audience, “global cinema is reinventing itself … there are many films from countries that are not habituated to coming to Cannes, such as Mongolia. There is a strong presence from Africa, North Africa, East and West Africa, and in this new generation of filmmakers, many are female.”
As if to prove the point, the only two filmmakers appearing in the competition lineup for the first time are two women from the African continent. It feels like a seminal moment for world cinema.
The better known of the two female filmmakers making their competition debut is Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania. Her shocking drama Beauty and the Dogs played in the Cannes “Un Certain Regard” section in 2017, and her last effort, the art thriller The Man Who Sold His Skin, played in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2020.
Her new film, Four Daughters, will be the only Arab film in competition. It documents the real-life story of Olfa, a mother coping with the disappearance of her two eldest daughters. In their absence, the director mixes documentary and fiction to create a unique cinema experience to recount the story of these women, casting Egyptian-Tunisian legend Hend Sabri in the lead role.
The big surprise announcement was the inclusion in the competition of Senegalese director Ramata-Toulaye Sy. Banel & Adama is her first film and is the only debut movie to play in the competition. It tells a Romeo and Juliet–type story but has a twist in that Adama refuses to accept the patriarchal society’s norms, which profoundly impacts the community when Banel becomes the village leader.
But it’s not just these two debutants demonstrating the tectonic shift eastward in cinema. Also returning to competition are two previous Palme d’Or winners, Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda.
Add to this lineup China’s Wang Bing with his new documentary Jeunesse (one of two films he has playing at the festival); the Vietnamese-French filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, whose latest film is an adaptation of a French historical novel; and Brazilian-Algerian director Karin Ainouz’s Firebrand starring Jude Law and Alicia Vikander, and it’s clear that this is more than just a symbolic effort to represent other sections of world cinema.
Perhaps this should come as no surprise. The profile of films from Asia and the Arab world has exploded in the past decade. The apex of this was Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which not only won the Palme d’Or in 2020 but then went on to win the Oscar, the first foreign-language film to do so.
The Oscar win for Parasite rather than its Cannes win was significant. It was a sign that films no longer needed to be in English to be culturally significant in the English-language world.
Learning from streaming services
Paradoxically, the cinematic world may have its apparent nemesis, the streaming services, to thank for this. Netflix, Amazon, et al have changed the game with their combination of global and local programming. They realized that to attract the wealthy Middle East and Asian populations to their platform, it pays to stream content relevant to them.
And with access to these products, global audiences have demonstrated they are willing to take chances on films such as the Telugu-language epic RRR, pushing it all the way to the Oscars. This is truly significant to Cannes, which has been looking east for sponsorship deals with companies such as TikTok in recent years, and the programmers have taken heed.
There is also a question of quality. One only needs to look at the myriad sections of the Cannes to see that Arab cinema has never been in better shape. In the “Un Certain Regard” section, Goodbye Julia is the first Sudanese film to be in the official selection of Cannes. Also playing in this section are two Moroccan films, Asmae El Moudir’s documentary The Mother of All Lies and Kamal Lazraq’s Hounds.
Morocco also features in the Directors’ Fortnight selection with Faouzi Bensaidi’s Deserts. And the Jordanian film Inshallah a Boy by Amjad al-Rasheed is in Critic’s Week.
Asian films also move beyond being Japanese, Indian, Chinese and Korean fare. Although there are plenty of those too. One of the most anticipated films at Cannes is the coming-of-age tale If Only I Could Hibernate, the first film from Mongolia to feature at the festival.
Yet this shift is more than about sponsorship and money. It’s the sign of a huge cultural change that took place in Europe and North America during the Covid-19 pandemic fueled by movements such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too.
While it would be churlish to say that either of these movements have done anything more than move the dial on the representation of women and black people in the film world, the debate around them contributed to a more extensive conversation over who gets to tell stories.
It’s now crucial that the people telling the stories have authentic voices and are not telling European or American stories by proxy. And as the streaming services are demonstrating, audiences will seek out films that speak directly to them, in a voice recognizable to them.
Cannes has taken note. To be relevant today in a global entertainment market, it must search out and embrace movies from beyond traditional boundaries. Africa, Asia and the Arab world have been the primary beneficiaries.
This article was provided by Syndication Bureau, which holds copyright.