This year’s Cannes Film Festival turned out to be an affair to be remembered. For starters, there were additions to its formal dress code, which included a puritan clause of no “naked dressing" immediately eluded by Bella Hadid who wore a very risqué look on the opening night’s red carpet. The dress code also banned voluminous dresses, including those with long trails, so as not to disturb seat mates inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière. Yet no one would have dreamed to turn away Heidi Klum, Eva Longoria, or Chinese influencer Wan QianHui, the latter walking the red carpet in what one media called “an enormous pouf of tulle.” And Cate Blanchett, in Cannes to announce the Displacement Film Fund, a new grant for displaced filmmakers, set up with the international film festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) Hubert Bals Fund, wore a black Louis Vuitton number with two giant pompoms and a trail. One wonders what it must have been like to sit next to gorgeous Cate inside the theater. 

Another rule issued pointed to a moratorium on political statements, on and off the stages of the GTL and the adjoining Debussy theater, where many of the titles outside of the main Competition were screened. Of course, the festival broke that rule before the event even started, by sending out a press release pointing to the “exceptional screenings of three films dedicated to the War in Ukraine,” and declaring the morning of May 13th, the festival’s opening day “Ukraine Day.” Other timely political films in the line ups of the Festival de Cannes this year included Palestinian twins Tarzan and Arab Nasser’s Once Upon a Time in Gaza, winner of the Best Director award in Un Certain Regard, and Tawfeek Barhom’s I’m Glad You're Dead Now, which the Israeli-Arab filmmaker said in his acceptance speech, after he won Best Short Film in Competition, “is for Palestine and for peace.” But also Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s Yes, which critics called ‘a delirious absurdist tale,” a raging criticism of his own government’s reaction following the events of October 7th, 2023. Lapid’s follow up to his critical successes Ahed’s Knee and Synonyms screened in Critics’ Week in Cannes.  

By the time this hugely successful festival had ended, twelve days later, one Japanese talent agent had been injured by a falling palm tree, while he walked with a film’s delegation on the Croisette. And on the festival’s closing day, when the Palme d’Or was set to be handed out along with the other Palmares, sabotage caused for a electrical substation near the city of Cannes to be shut down, bringing darkness to the Croisette and surrounding areas. The Palais des Festivals kicked in its massive generators and the show, as they say, did go on. Although there were a few hairdos that had clearly suffered from the lack of electricity in hotels and salons all around Cannes. 

Yet what people come to Cannes for, year after year, is great cinema and this year was a phenomenal edition of the greatest show on earth. Tom Cruise brought Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, which could be his final turn as Ethan Hunt yet ends with a bit of hope for the franchise’s fans; Wes Anderson world premiered his museum collection of a film The Phoenician Scheme, his best since The Grand Budapest Hotel, walking the iconic red carpeted Montée des Marches accompanied by most of the film’s stellar cast; actors turned filmmakers Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson, and Harris Dickinson presented their first features to the world; and when all was said and done, prizes were handed out to those who made political statements with their films.

In fact, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi walked away with the Palme d’Or for his latest work It Was Just an Accident, his most personal work to date. Mixing Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author with a kind of Iranian revenge Western, the story of It Was Just an Accident centers around five people who may or may not have recognized in a man their prison torturer and who kidnap him to find out. Blanchett, along with this year’s Competition Jury President Juliette Binoche, handed Panahi—who has been repeatedly banned and imprisoned in his own country for making cinema—his well deserved award. And the filmmaker said, following the ceremony, that he will be going back to Iran, to continue his work. That’s one Super Man right there, with great hair to boot. 

While we are, briefly, on the subject of great hair, French-Spanish filmmaker Óliver Laxe won both the Jury Prize for his beguiling Competition title Sirât, but also best man’s hair in the festival. The story of a father, along with his son, who seeks his lost daughter within a community of ravers in the Moroccan desert, the Mimosas filmmaker’s latest is produced by Pedro Almodóvar.

A little girl from across the border from Iran, and the auteur who wrote her, won the audience’s heart, quite literally. The President’s Cake by Iraqi filmmaker Hasan Hadi walked away with the Audience Choice Award in the Director’s Fortnight. The story of a young girl living in the marshes of Iraq with her grandmother, during Saddam’s rule, who is tasked with making the annual cake in honor of the “President’s birthday” is a fairy tale of possibilities. It mixes all the best that cinema has to give and also won the contemplative, lovely filmmaker, who learned filmmaking at NYU, a Camera d’Or for Best First Film in the festival. 

In the sidebar competition section of Un Certain Regard, which is reserved for films with unusual stories and told in unconventional ways, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo by Diego Céspedes won top prize. Once again the story of a little girl, this one brought up within a loving Queer community in the north of Chile, in the early 1980’s, the film stars a phenomenal transgender actress Paula Dinamarca, whom Céspedes credits for her help in drawing up the character of Mama Boa, the woman at the helm of the house. “Paula is a friend of mine and she taught me a lot,” the young Chilean filmmaker told Flaunt in Cannes, “there is a lot of her in the movie.” About the story, he also conceded that the idea was one long gestating for him, since his parents had owned a hair salon in the suburbs of Santiago. One by one, his mom had seen her gay hairdressers pass away from AIDS, creating within the young Diego “this terrifying idea of what AIDS was,” which later, through his writing, developed into a deeper understanding of a community of what he calls “luminous people.”

Inaugurating the section was Promised Sky, a film from Tunisia about a community of women from Ivory Coast, living in the capital Tunis both legally and illegally. “The Western world doesn’t realize that the majority of people in Africa emigrate to another African country,” Erige Sehiri, the director and co-writer of this stunning work of the seventh art told Flaunt. Her leading ladies, three women and a little girl, come out of Sehiri’s vision in mixing together one beloved French-Senegalese actress, Aïssa Maïga; an Ivorian artist and model who uses her hair as her canvas, Laetitia Ky; a spellbinding newcomer with a stellar career ahead of her, Deborah Lobe Naney; and a little girl, Estelle Kenza Dogbo, whose real life story is eerily similar to that of her character, also named Kenza. Promised Sky is a beautifully shot and perfectly told tale that illuminates how, as women, we are forever divvying up an ever shrinking piece of that proverbial pie, only to find ourselves dissatisfied with the results and torn apart from our sisters. 

Walking away with the Best Actor prize in Un Certain Regard, Frank Dillane is a name you’ll hear a lot in the coming months. He’s a bit like a young Marlon Brando, and the similitude wasn’t lost on his director, Babygirl actor-turned-filmmaker Harris Dickinson. In his first foray into film making titled Urchin, Dickinson cast Dillane, the son of British TV and film actor Stephen Dillane, as Mike, a young unhoused man who encountes redemption and then systemic defeat while living on the streets of London. Dickinson even gave Mike a pair of snakeskin loafers, reminiscent of the snakeskin jacket Brando wears in Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind. The result is a film that although could sound dire and downcast, is anything but—turning into a fascinating character study and an acting tour-de-force for Dillane. And let’s not forget that the role required a special Hair & Make Up Designer, the wondrous Lisa Mustafa, to show Mike’s degrees of success and failure, a beautiful touch which didn’t go unnoticed by this writer. 

Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason also screened his latest, The Love that Remains, in Un Certain Regard, and one of film’s protagonists, Icelandic sheepdog Panda walked away from the festival with a prize of her own—the Palme Dog, a tongue-in-cheek play on the name of the top honor in Cannes, the Palme d’Or. The film takes an irreverent, and at times fantastical look at a family where the parents have recently separated and features one of the most haunting final images of any film in Cannes this year. It also changes tone as dramatically as Icelandic weather and feels like a scrapbook of Pálmason’s work. In fact, the filmmaker admitted that some images in The Love that Remains “were also shot before principal photography, because I always have a camera with me and need to film what’s going on around me, in real life.”

Adam’s Sake by Belgian filmmaker Laura Wandel is a film produced by the Dardenne brothers which premiered in Critics’ Week in Cannes. The film follows two women, Lucy a head nurse played by Léa Drucker and Rebecca, a young mother played by Anamaria Vartolomei, as they jostle for the care of young Adam, Rebecca’s son, in Lucy’s care following a bad case of malnutrition. The resolve of the two women, in taking care of Adam, each from their own point of view, has the audience question which one of them is the true hero in the story. And the film is unexpected in every way, something difficult to achieve in a jaded system, which keep rolling out remake after remake.

Another breakout performance rewarded at the festival this year was by debuting French actress Nadia Melliti whose turn as Fatima in Hafsia Herzi's The Little Sister won her a Best Actress Award in the main Cannes Competition. The film is the cinematic adaptation of Fatima Daas’ bestselling book La Petite Dernière and offers a personal insight into the coming out, and coming of age of a Muslim gay woman, the only sibling in her family to have been born in France of Algerian parents. The film showed a true wonder woman, while not always a perfectly likable one, as most women who are considered strong are also often labelled disobedient, and Melliti truly showed us, the audience, all the nuances of such a girl. 

While on the subject of unruly women, ones who don’t conform and yet still manage to win our hearts, Kristen Stewart’s foray into directing is truly a groundbreaking step. She too drew inspiration from a personal book, this one penned by Lidia Yuknavitch, titled The Chronology of Water. In it, Stewart takes us deep into the trauma and subsequent lashing out of a young woman who suffered abuse at the hands of her father. Interpreted with gusto by British actress Imogen Poots, the film never shies away from close ups of uncomfortable things, both images and ideas. Stewart’s debut behind the camera is a powerful statement of her talent, which has always been lived outside the boxes society imposes on actors, particularly women, like her. 

‍

Written by E. Nina Rothe