Many films dedicated to Nazi horror and the Holocaust have been welcomed, celebrated and rewarded by the Cannes Film Festival. There was, in particular, the tragicomic ‘‘Life is Beautiful’’ by Roberto Benigni (Grand Prix – 1997), the moving and masterful ‘‘The Pianist’’ by Roman Polanski (Palme d’Or – 2002 ), the dark and poignant ‘‘White Ribbon’’ by Michael Haneke (Palme d’Or – 2009) and the atypical and dazzling ‘‘The son of Saul’’ by Laszlo Nemes (Grand Prix – 2015).
At the end of a selection marked by a majority of films dealing with the duality of suspicion / guilt, the Palme d’Or at the 76th Cannes Film Festival went to ‘‘Anatomy of a Fall’’, a French family drama which dissects the mechanisms of suspicion (and the resulting guilt) weighing on a wife after the (accidental?) defenestration of her husband.
Greatly forgotten on the prize list of the 76th Cannes Film Festival, Nanni Moretti has once again conquered the Croisette, with a poignant work tinged with humor and melancholy through which he casts a worried and sarcastic look at today’s cinema.
After a six-year absence and seventeen years of sobriety (feigned or real?), the great Finnish master of zany comedy, Aki Kaurismäki, is back in the footsteps of his famous “losers’ trilogy” (“Drifting Clouds” – 1996 , “The Man Without a Past” – 2002 , “Lights in the Dusk” – 2006). Presented in the Official Competition, his latest opus “Fallen Leaves” won the Jury Prize and dazzled the Croisette with its offbeat, minimalist aesthetic.
Based on the true story of a family tragedy that shook Tunisia in 2014: that of Olfa Hamrouni and her 4 daughters, two of whom were indoctrinated by ISIS, Kaouther Ben Hania’s “Olfa’s Daughters” brilliantly and insightfully dissects the indoctrination process through which Islamists brainwash the socially and psychologically fragile.
The Russian invasion of Ukrainian has led to the Swiss government imposing sanctions on Russia and wealthy Russians close to Vladimir Putin by freezing their Swiss bank accounts. Lately, Switzerland is also “closely monitoring” Chinese wealth in Swiss banks following the intelligence input – that Beijing is considering supplying Russia with lethal weapons, such as drones and munitions. According to a Financial Times report, Switzerland’s tough stance on sanctions has fueled concern among wealthy Chinese about whether keeping their money in Switzerland is safe.
On 11 September 2001, journalist Carine Azzopardi was covering the attacks in New York, where she happened to be. On 13 November 2015, her partner and father of their children, music journalist Guillaume Barreau-Decherf, 43, was murdered at the Bataclan. In her book “Ces petits renoncements qui tuent” (Plon), Carine Azzopardi gives the – anonymous – testimony of a French teacher, confronted on a daily basis with the vindictive Islamism of some of his pupils. He refuses to give up and remains hopeful.
Rejection of secularism, denial of science and conspiracy… Teachers in the national education system find themselves confronted with a challenge not only to the republican model, but also to the Enlightenment, against a backdrop of a general decline in the level of students. Understaffed, teachers do not feel supported by their superiors, who seem to be out of touch with reality.
On 18 November 2022, the Brussels Court of First Instance condemned an Internet user, considering that his comment published on the social network Facebook seriously called into question my honour and reputation, which are rights guaranteed by Article 8 of the European Court of Human Rights. The court found that the comment called into question my ethics and my competence as a teacher “by imputing to her a subjectivity and xenophobia that would not allow her to give exams without an assessor by her side”, without presenting any verifiable factual elements.
