At the Cannes Film Festival’s opening-night dinner on Tuesday, the festival president, Iris Knobloch, addressed her guests with a cri de coeur.
“Cinema does not shield us from the world,” she said. “It helps us navigate it.”
It was hard to imagine anyone in the well-heeled crowd arguing with such a statement, though just how precisely a festival is meant to engage with the wider world has already become the first great debate of Cannes.
Blame Berlin. At the film festival held there in February, the jury president, Wim Wenders, set off a firestorm when he was asked about the festival’s stance on Israel and the war in Gaza. “We have to stay out of politics, because if we make movies that are decidedly political, we enter the field of politics,” Wenders said.
If his answer was meant to defuse tensions, it had the opposite effect: Wenders was roundly criticized for having an out-of-touch perspective, and the festival’s news conferences became dominated by political questions, with actors repeatedly pressed about their views on Israel and Gaza and what one journalist termed “the rise of fascism.”
Could Cannes face a similar situation? When asked about the Berlin controversy on Monday, the festival director, Thierry Frémaux, initially defended Wenders.
“I think he was subjected to criticisms that weren’t really justified,” Frémaux told journalists. “He wanted to say that the politics should be on the screen. That’s what we say at Cannes.”
Still, this has never been a place where politics were neatly confined to the borders of a film strip. Founded in 1939 as a response to the growing influence of fascism at the Venice Film Festival, the first edition of Cannes was canceled on its opening night when Germany invaded Poland.
In the decades since, as Cannes became the world’s most renowned film festival, certain aspects of it reflected retrograde political attitudes. During the years when female filmmakers were all but excluded from the competition lineup, for example, the festival appeared far more concerned with policing women’s red-carpet footwear.
Whether Frémaux likes it or not, political crosscurrents are bound to blow through Cannes. Over the coming days, films will unspool from the director Pedro Almodóvar and the actors Javier Bardem and Hannah Einbinder, who have long been outspoken about the war in Gaza. And though some members of the competition jury spoke delicately at a Tuesday news conference, so as not to offend, the screenwriter Paul Laverty was less inclined to hold his tongue.
Sitting on a dais alongside his fellow jurors Demi Moore and Stellan Skarsgard, Laverty noted that actors like Bardem, Mark Ruffalo and Susan Sarandon have faced professional blowback “because of their views in opposing the murder of women and children in Gaza,” adding, “Shame on Hollywood people who do that. My respect and total solidarity to them.”
Gesturing to the official Cannes poster, which was emblazoned with a still of Sarandon and Geena Davis from “Thelma & Louise,” Laverty joked, “I just hope we don’t get bombed now because we’ve got this poster.”
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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