For days leading up to the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, it seemed that rain would dampen the 78th edition. The film gods spared the worst. The red carpet remained dry Tuesday and so did the beautiful people parading into the Lumière, the grand auditorium where each year cheek-kissing, glad-handing stars and deal makers get this generally fizzy party going. At the 2024 edition, a barefoot chanteuse had sung Bowie’s “Modern Love” to Greta Gerwig, the president of the jury, delighting her and everyone else in attendance. This year, by contrast, the atmosphere inside the room was moody and felt more uncertain than the weather.
There were the usual smiles, couture gowns and starry entrances. Yet overall it was a fairly sober affair, and only partly because the evening featured a poignant tribute to David Lynch, who died in January. When Juliette Binoche, the president of the main competition jury, took the stage, she spoke about the obligation of artists to testify on behalf of others, mentioning the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 and quoting the Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who in April was killed with 10 family members in an Israeli airstrike. Hassouna is featured in a documentary here, “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.”
Later during the ceremony, Robert De Niro received an honorary Palme d’Or (handed to him by Leonardo DiCaprio), and spoke of democracy and the arts. “America’s philistine president has had himself appointed the head of one of our premiere cultural institutions,” he said, an apparent reference to President Trump’s naming himself chairman of the Kennedy Center in February. De Niro then referenced the topic that started phones pinging throughout the entertainment industry on May 4, and led to stark headlines and head-scratching.
To wit, President Trump’s May 4 announcement on social media that he was imposing a 100 percent tariff on movies “produced in foreign lands,” an issue he called a national security threat. The next day, a White House spokesman, Kush Desai, said that no final decisions had been made on such tariffs, but that the administration was “exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again.”
Like other film lovers, I responded to this tariff threat with a mixture of concern and confusion. Among other things, how such tariffs would work is baffling given the movie world’s complexity and internationalism, or how it’s possible to even define which films are “produced in foreign lands.” Marvel’s “Thunderbolts*” was partly shot outside the United States; when Florence Pugh steps off a skyscraper in the movie, she topples from a building in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The specter of retaliatory tariffs from other countries is another concern, given how reliant American companies are on the global market. In 2024, “Inside Out 2” was the top-grossing movie both domestically and overseas, with 61.6 percent of its overall box office coming from abroad.
There’s much potentially at stake both in the United States and abroad. In an interview with Variety, Gaëtan Bruel, the president of France’s National Film Board, noted that “European cinema accounts for only 1 percent of theatrical admissions in the United States and American cinema accounts for 60 percent of admissions in Europe.” Bruel also noted that European Union members can force streamers to invest in their film and TV production, which some in the American industry have criticized. Last year, Netflix filed an appeal in Belgium protesting the E.U. law; Disney joined it in November.
The tariff threat seems especially alarming for the American entertainment industry, which, despite recent successes like “Sinners,” is still struggling to recover from the pandemic, the Hollywood strikes of 2023 and innumerable self-inflicted wounds. Given that the remaining large studios seem intent on destroying theatrical exhibition and scarcely interested in making movies at all, it is going to take much more than tariffs to make Hollywood great again. The situation is wildly frustrating. Yet the first thing that popped into my head when I heard about the possible tariff was Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” and the already-fragile foreign-language film market in the United States.
“Parasite” had its world premiere here in Cannes in 2019 in the main competition and quickly became a critical favorite before going on to win the Palme d’Or; it was the fourth Bong production that I had first seen here. In 2018, the American company Neon made a deal to finance and release “Parasite” in the United States. Neon didn’t just distribute the movie, it also nurtured “Parasite” into a must-see sensation and offered further proof that subtitles in movies are no longer the barrier for Americans that they had been. By the time “Parasite” finally closed, it had won four Oscars, including best picture and director.
It’s impossible to quantify how much a role Cannes played in the movie’s fortunes. What is certain is that because this is the most prestigious film festival in the world and one of the most globally publicized, it elevated Bong’s reputation enormously and exponentially broadened his audience. Cannes also legitimizes filmmakers for other festivals, which program them and attract yet more audiences. The film festival circuit is effectively an alternative distribution network that reaches around the world. The big American studios dominate the global market, but the festivals help give movie lovers real choices, different stories, art.
These days, “Oppenheimer” notwithstanding, the movies that often generate real excitement in the United States, the ones that end up on Top 10 lists and sometimes even win Academy Awards, aren’t released by what we still nostalgically call Hollywood. They’re movies like “Parasite” and Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which Neon also released. “Anora” too won the Palme d’Or and went on to win best picture. It was among a clutch of movies that were at Cannes in 2024 and went on to make the Oscars more interesting, including the Latvian animated feature “Flow”; the Spanish-language French musical “Emilia Pérez”; and the French horror movie “The Substance,” with Demi Moore.
It’s too early to know what selections in this year’s festival will hit with American audiences. It’s easy to admire the critical favorite “Sound of Falling,” from the German director Mascha Schilinski, which is set in the same northern German farm in four time periods over a century. From the early 20th century to the present, it jumps around chronologically to follow four girls of varying ages whose lives are at once different and mystically connected. Death haunts all the sections, and ghosts (perhaps those of earlier girls) seem to as well, as the hovering, at times floating camera work suggests. Technically virtuosic, the movie gestures at certain ideas, patriarchy very much included, without persuasively cohering.
I’ve seen some strong movies, notably “Two Prosecutors,” a drama from the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa. Set in the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union in the 1937, though clearly as much about Putin’s Russia as Stalin’s, it centers on a dangerously idealistic young lawyer who learns that the secret police are exterminating party members. It’s obvious from the moment he appears that his idealism will doom him. But Loznitsa holds you rapt with brutal faces, restless camera work, meticulous filmmaking, shivers of bitter wit, and scenes of characters just talking that set your heart to racing. This is the kind of international title that enriches American moviegoing life.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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