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Cannes Cannes film festival, May 16 - May 23 2023

RITA DI SANTO looks forward to political offerings at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival 

JUST five weeks before it opens, Cannes Film Festival unveiled its 2023 line-up. In the running for the festival’s top prize will be films by five returning winners: Loach, Wenders, Kore-eda, Ceylan and Moretti; the way these directors see the world says a lot about their commitment, and their films will likely dominate the cinema conversation in the coming 12 months. 

Beyond the glitz and glamour of the red carpet, Cannes has always been a political festival, albeit in only the films it selects with talk about politics reserved for the artists themselves. 

One of the titles announced was Ken Loach’s highly anticipated The Old Oak. Loach, who is now 86 (two times Palme D’Or winner for The Wind That Shakes The Barley and I, Daniel Blake), has long been a favourite of the festival. In fact, Cannes’s General Delegate Thierry Fremaux offered some pointed remarks at the press conference. Fremaux wanted the movie immediately on seeing it, a movie that talks, he said, “about the global evil of capitalism and emigration from a little village.” 

While it is true Loach has gone unappreciated in his native land for many years, Cannes has always offered the shelter and glory he deserves. 

Loach’s latest is a drama that centres on the last remaining pub in a small mining village in the north-east of England. Syrian refugees have been housed nearby, leading to tensions with the locals. The pub is at the heart of the film and the community, but with the influx of refugees, it becomes contested territory and the community splinters in reaction to the new arrivals. 

Loach is not only a remarkable filmmaker but the only British filmmaker who has, with strong and unwavering left-leaning convictions, directed wonderful movies that survey the challenges of the working class. Are they politically correct? No, but they are obliquely fierce. Loach is able to turn the particular into the universal and to appeal to audiences the world over. His understated style burns with an inner ferocity, and subliminal black humour. He has perfected the workers’ tragedy as a blunt and unspectacular object. 

Another additionally politically noteworthy film in Cannes is Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves, which tells a story about love, solidarity, and hope. It is the fourth instalment that continues Kaurismaki’s so-called Proletariat Trilogy. 

In it, with disarming amusement, like a social-realist farce, Kaurismaki creates intimate stories, populated by working-class outcasts of his native Finland, struggling in depressed economic conditions, with the day-to-day hardships of boring jobs, unemployment, homelessness, and refugees. 

Kaurismaki’s modern social critiques mercifully employ deadpan humour to rescue the viewer from utter hopelessness and to shield one from the bitterness his characters suffer. Viewing Kaurismaki’s films remind us how the personal is political.  

Outside of the core competition, Cannes’s Un Certain Regard will showcase a wide range of emerging, up-and-coming directors from around the world, including a large delegation of films from the African continent, and a first film from Mongolia.

Why is Cannes still considered the most important film festival in the world? 

It has something to do with the distinction of its past, and almost every filmmaker in the world wants his or her latest offering in there. Cannes remains the most formidable film festival because it is not afraid to go against the taste of the salespeople who moan that there is nothing commercial to buy. In Cannes, art and politics triumph over commerce. 

And this year Cannes is proposing a genuinely good competition, with at least 10 films anyone properly interested in cinema and in what is happening in the world will want to see. 

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