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.
What is the most inelegant and unforgivable thing Maïwenn has done? Pulling Edwy Plenel’s hair out or plunging the opening of the 76th Cannes Film Festival with her insipid and very disappointing “Jeanne du Barry”?
In the first part of this “observatory of teachers faced with the expression of religion in schools” (IFOP survey for WATCH SCREEN, published on 9 December), 45% of teachers admitted to censoring themselves in their lessons in order to avoid possible incidents provoked by certain pupils. In this second survey, one teacher in five said that he or she had been the victim, at least once in his or her career, of a religious or identity-based attack. This undoubtedly explains this!
Two years after the beheading of Samuel Paty, our survey of teachers shows that fear has not changed sides at all. Attacks on secularism are on the rise to such an extent that more than half of the teachers censor themselves to avoid causing “incidents”…
Two hundred intellectuals and civil society activists, as well as some thirty associations, in the Maghreb and in the North African diaspora in Europe, have made public a petition denouncing the assassination attempt against Salman Rushdie, entitled ‘’We refuse to allow the crime to be committed in our name’’.
Here is the full verbatim:
After the headless (Islamist) models, here is the documentary without hair! Presented in a special screening at the last Cannes Film Festival, “Salam” by the former rapper Diam’s (co-directed with Houda Benyamina and Anne Cissé) is a Salafist propaganda film strictly framed by the standards of the most rigorous Islamism.
The opening ceremony of the 75th Cannes International Film Festival was marked by a surprise live intervention by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who called on the new generation of filmmakers to confront dictators, as Charlie Chaplin had done with his satire of Adolf Hitler in “The Great Dictator” (1940)
In a poignant speech that marked the opening ceremony of the 75th Cannes Film Festival, French actor Vincent Lindon, who chairs the official competition jury, distinguished himself with an ode to the committed and civic cinema he has described as a “weapon of massive emotion”, whose function is to “awaken consciences and shake up indifference”.
Lindon, who has repeatedly moved the Croisette through social and militant films – from “La Loi du marché » (The Law of the Market), 2005, which won him the Best Actor Award’ to ‘’en guerre’’At War), 2018 – urged the cinema to “speak loud and clear the voice of the voiceless”, saying that “even if it amounts to scooping, with a thimble, the hull of a ship which fills up in waves, our strength is is that we believe in it, and that your works are immortal”.
Here is the full verbatim of this speech which will remain, for a long time, in the memories of festival-goers and lovers of the seventh art.
