With major American studios absent from the competition programme for the first time in decades, the 79th Cannes Film Festival has rediscovered its original identity — and found it in surprisingly fine form.
The 79th Cannes Film Festival opened on Tuesday with a glamour that belied the diplomatic tensions simmering along the Croisette. With Hollywood's major studios conspicuously absent from the competition programme — a consequence of ongoing negotiations over streaming rights, festival exclusivity windows and, according to several industry insiders, an increasingly transactional relationship between American distributors and prestige European platforms — the field has been left to a generation of international filmmakers who appear entirely unbothered by the Americans' absence.
James Gray's new film, described by critics who attended the press screening as 'his best since Two Lovers', opened the festival to a ten-minute standing ovation. Nicolas Winding Refn arrived with a work that divided the assembled press corps almost exactly down the middle — precisely the kind of reception that suggests an award is coming.
Demi Moore on AI
Jury president Demi Moore used her opening press conference to deliver an unexpectedly substantive address on artificial intelligence and its implications for cinema. 'We are at a moment of genuine decision,' she said. 'Not about whether AI will be used in filmmaking — it already is — but about who controls it, who benefits from it, and what is lost when we automate the parts of storytelling that are most irreducibly human.' The speech was met with prolonged applause and was widely shared across social media within hours.
British Presence
British cinema is represented in the competition by two films, including a debut feature from south London director Adesola Okafor that acquired significant buzz during its Sundance premiere and arrives in Cannes as the early favourite for the Camera d'Or. BAFTA-winner Jessie Buckley is also in attendance for a retrospective screening, and the British Film Institute has mounted an impressive presence in the industry village.
