With all the Grand Théâtre Lumière standing, visibly excited, the great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi made history this Saturday in the 78th edition of the Cannes Festival with A simple accident, A film at a clandestine form in Tehran that portrays, with powerful allegorical force, the deep wounds of the Iranian people in the face of the abuses of the theocratic regime that governs it. Panahi arrived in Cannes after 15 years without being able to leave Iran, challenging a prison sentence and the prohibition of filming. With this golden palm, in addition, Panahi – as Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Altman – has won the top awards of the three most important film festivals in the world: Cannes, Venice and Berlin.
Since the white van in which the characters in this film cross the official section of Cannes, its desperate adventures pointed to the top of the palmraés. For comic and absurd moments, A simple accident It is a devastating road movie On the kidnapping of a regime torturer for one of his victims and the entanglement that arises when the kidnapper arises doubts about whether or not he must kill his executioner. From there, the film moves in anguishing circles, with a very theatrical structure, around the moral dilemma that carries its characters: does revenge make sense? Can we be free without compassion? The Panahi film’s response is terrifying but, as the president of the jury, Juliette Binoche, falls, reminds us of the importance of compassion and humanity.
With the golden palm in his hand, the Iranian filmmaker made a request: “I allow myself to ask the Iranians and everyone to leave the differences aside and fight for the important thing: freedom.” As Joachim Trier recalled (Grand Prix of the Jury, the second in importance, by Sentimental Value) and the Spanish Oliver Laxe (jury prize for Sirât, out of water con Sound of Falling, From the German Mascha Schilinski), cinema is a weapon to fight those differences. “Like the girl who learns to walk before speaking, cinema is a universal language that unites peoples,” said Trier.
Laxe, on the other hand, recalled an appointment extracted from the Qur’an who shared with him a Palestinian taxi driver who picked him up during a visit to the Jerusalem Film Festival. He asked Lax if he was Jewish. He explained that maybe he had Muslim blood, or Jewish, or who knows if Viking, since he is Galician. “We are all bastards,” added the filmmaker. The Koran phrase, which Laxe recited in Arabic, French and Spanish, says: “We have made you different tribes so that you know each other among you.” In SirâtLaxe converts the adventure into a man’s desert and his son with a troupe of Raveros On a shocking trip to the abyss.
The sabotage that left Cannes without light or communications all on Saturday morning caused the foreseeable nerves to be multiplied before the Palmares. The confusion seized the hotels where the movies of the films are staying, but from 15.00 everything returned to its course. The festival contributed to the calm with a statement in which it assured that with or without light everything went ahead, because the Palace of Festivals has an individual electricity generator.
The jury prize for the subsidiary drama Sentimental Value confirms the maturity of the Norwegian Joachim Trier. His film is magnificent, with impressive acting work. Trier composes a deep drama focused on a film director, his daughter actress and the family home whose cracks sneaks into the past with all his pain. Trier collects the glove of Ingmar Bergman and that of Henrik Ibsen with explicit tributes to go, with humor, knowledge and tenderness, towards an exciting place.
After Panahi and Trier, the most recognized film of the Palmares was the Brazilian The secret agent. It deals with historical memory and cinephile and calmed very deeply from the beginning by its brilliant script and staging but, above all, how it transcends its main story – that of a man persecuted during the years of the dictatorship that arrives in the city of Recife to meet with his son and leave the country together – to, in a final blow of the chill, talk about the dismembered of the present. The film won two important awards: the best director for Kleber Mendonça Filho and the best actor for its protagonist, Wagner Moura.
The best actress for the jury chaired by Juliette Binoche was Nadia Melliti, the young protagonist of The last little one, of Hafsia Herzi, in which Melliti gives life to a young lesbian Muslim. He is a deserved award for an unleaded actress, 23, who endures the weight of the entire film. If she was the youngest in the palmarés, the Dardenne were the most veterans. Of the 10 times they have competed in Cannes, they have finished eight times in their record. This time they took the prize for the best script for Newbornsthe story of a group of teenage mothers with problems of social integration or drugs and alcohol that live in a host house while deciding what to do with their lives.
Resurrection, The imaginative trip to the history of the Chinese Bi Gan cinema, achieved a special mention at the beginning of the gala, an award that the jury was released from the sleeve to remind one of the names that has most excited in a more vigorous edition of what seemed on paper. The lack of great names has served to give way to the talents of Mendonça Filho, Tier, Bi Gan, Laxe or Schilinski, all of them in very different orbits, but born when television and homemade cameras began to transform the cinematographic language.
The Golden Chamber for the best festival’s prima opera, awarded by a jury chaired by Alice Rohrwacher, went to the film The president’s cakeof Iraqi Hasan Hadi, about the absurdity of the cult of a leader through a girl in charge of preparing the birthday cake to Saddam Hussein. And in the section A certain look The winning film was The mysterious look of flamencoChilean Opera Diego Céspedes.
Cannes ended this Saturday as it started: with a strange sensation of alert and chaos. The first day, the actresses and their stylists affected the new label measures required by the festival and that, by the way, to which not everyone has folded. And in his closure it was a sabotage that groped a city that for two weeks concentrates his life in the dark rooms of his mastodontic Palace of Festivals.