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.”