The Cannes Film Festival Turns Into a Mirror Reflecting Social Atrocities and Injustices

The 75^th Cannes Film Festival is turning out to be quite the platform for voicing protest. The latest in the list of protests is the protest staged by Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechnyi, who made a statement regarding the censorship of the images of the war currently taking place in his home country.

Before the Cannes premiere of his film Butterfly Vision on May 25, he along with the producers of his film, Darya Bassel and Yelizaveta Smit, and the female lead actor Rita Burkovska unrolled a banner saying, "Russians kill Ukrainians. Do you find it offensive or disturbing to talk about this genocide?”. They also held up mock censorship screens reading ‘Sensitive Content’ in front of their faces, as the air raid sirens played over the speaker system in the background.

 

This is just days after the much talked about Holy Spider protest staged by feminist protesters at the premiere of the Iranian film, before the arrival of the film cast. They created quite the atmosphere with the help of handheld smoke devices and carried a long banner up the iconic Palais stairs, with the names of the 129 cases of femicide in France since the previous Cannes film festival. The film Holy Spider is about the true story of serial killer Saeed Hanaei who murdered sex workers, whose mission in life was to reinstate purity in the world by wiping out sins.

 

The stripping of a woman on the red carpet days after Cannes film festival started this time around, was indicative, if nothing else, of the times of extreme distress and suffering the globe is presently plagued with, especially the grief and loss due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the premiere of Three Thousand Years of Longing, the guests including Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, were interrupted by a women whose body was painted with the colours of the Ukrainian flag, with the words ‘Stop Raping Us’. Protesting against the sexual violence against women in Ukraine, she was indeed successful in highlighting the angst caused by the war.

 

 

Might we add that the 2018 silent protest by 82 women from the film industry, including actors Cate Blanchett, Kristen Stewart, Salma Hayek, and Jane Fonda seems to have set a precedent for protests at the Cannes in a way like never before. Shining the spotlight on the dearth of female directors at the festival back then, the women held hands in solidarity and walked up the Palais stairs together as a gesture of sisterhood, signifying the climbing of the social and professional ladder. Cate Blanchett, started the protest saying, “Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of the industry says otherwise,” before going on to confirm the group stood together as a “symbol of our determination to change and progress.”