Cannes Film Festival 2024: Cannes Film Festival: As far as your feet can carry you

Within two hours, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof made the decision to flee Iran. He took one last look out of the window of his apartment in northern Tehran, where you can see the wall of the notorious Evin prison, at the prison where many of his friends are currently held. He himself often sat there too. Only last year he was released after several months in prison. But he was recently sentenced again to eight years in prison and flogging for “conspiring against national security.”

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Now he had to choose between prison and exile. He watered his plants one last time, left his electronic devices behind and left his house and his country with a backpack and a few items of clothing. He went over the mountains to the other side of the border. In a safe location, he was able to contact the authorities in Germany, where he lived several years ago, and be identified. A day after reaching Germany, he publicly announced that he had managed to escape Iran.

He told all this in the press conference for his film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” at the Cannes Film Festival – the film he shot secretly and without permission in Iran. It sounds natural that a director would be present at the festival for the premiere of his film. But in the case of Mohammad Rasoulof, who first had to escape imprisonment and the whip and cross the Iranian border on foot, it was a sensation. Just as the film was finished and submitted to Cannes on time.

Rasoulof was just able to finish filming “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” before his new eight-year prison sentence took effect. »If you have had a lot to do with secret service people, you slowly learn how to get around them. You have to do things that gangsters actually do!” said Rasoulof in Cannes. His colleagues abroad then took over the editing and post-production of the film. He told his French producer Jean-Christophe Simon that the film should not be left behind under any circumstances, not even in the event of his arrest.

With the film saved, it now had to get itself to safety. During his time in prison, Rasoulof met all sorts of people, including human traffickers. He could use this to his advantage to escape. So he “left geographical Iran,” as he himself put it, “in order to continue living and continuing to tell his stories in cultural Iran, which has no borders.”

“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” premiered in competition on the last day of the festival. Many of the film team, including the main actors Soheila Golestani and Missagh Zareh, were not allowed to leave Iran. Mohammad Rasoulof had their pictures on the red carpet in his hand.

The story follows the family of a judicial officer (Missagh Zareh) in Tehran who has just received a promotion and is now about to become a judge at the Revolutionary Court. His proud wife (Soheila Golestani) thinks they should use this opportunity to finally tell their two daughters (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki) what their father actually does for a living and how sensitive his position is. The daughters, a student and a schoolgirl, should now be more careful about who they talk to and what they post on social media. In short: you should change your lifestyle.

Everything happens at the time when the “Woman – Life – Freedom” uprising begins in Iran. In “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” Rasoulof shows real Internet videos of the protests in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini and how they were bloodily suppressed by the authorities. Such videos also end up on the cell phones of the family’s two daughters. They slowly begin to question their father and his actions. At the premiere there was constant applause in the cinema when the young daughters challenged their father.

This film with its director’s escape story was a unique event, a political highlight of this year’s Cannes Festival, which director Thierry Frémaux wanted to organize free of politics. When the program was announced in advance of the festival, Frémaux said that politics should only take place on the screen. But with Rasoulof in the competition, one can hardly expect politics to remain only on the screen.

However, he did not win the Palme d’Or. The jury, led by US director Greta Gerwig, awarded “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” a special prize. Was the film too serious, too shocking, too political for the taste of the jury members?

A comedy actually won the “Palme d’Or” this year: “Anora” by US director Sean Baker. Baker, known for his independent films about sex workers, porn actors and generally people on the margins of US society, this time tells the story of a New York erotic dancer named Anora who is married to the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch family some kind of relationship begins. The film is very entertaining, has a subtle sense of humor and scenes that you won’t quickly forget, but it wasn’t necessarily the best work of this Cannes edition.

This year the film festival wanted to be a celebration of big names, especially old men. But the better films came from lesser-known directors. Of the 22 titles competing in the competition, only four were directed by women. Embarrassing and ridiculous for 2024.

The films that were expected to be big festival hits were quickly forgotten after their premiere. Above all, the long-awaited science fiction “Megalopolis” by Francis Ford Coppola, which he himself waited more than 40 years to realize and which he even sold his wineries to finance (the cost was $120 million). The end result was a gigantic production with lots of futuristic images and visual effects and little content – to put it mildly. The film is about a narcissistic architect (Adam Driver) who can stop time, who wants to design a future city for all humanity with the help of a special material called Megalon, who leaves a blonde, money-hungry femme fatale to then turn into an innocent woman to whom he proposes marriage after she becomes pregnant. So the film, which wants to be very forward-looking, sounds more like the day before yesterday.

So while famous names like Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg, Paul Schrader and even Yorgos Lanthimos disappointed with confused, meaningless, sometimes worn-out, even boring works, the French director Coralie Fargeat inspires with her brilliant body horror film “The Substance”. Mania surrounding the ideal of beauty. The lead roles were played by Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. In a sexist company where it’s incredibly important to have a perfect butt and not age, a TV aerobics icon (Demi Moore) is thrown out by her boss because she’s supposedly too old. But with the help of a miracle injection, she can become a younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of herself. The rejuvenated version then plays Margaret Qualley. And this perfect self literally begins to eat away at her.

In contrast to many famous directors, who at this edition of the festival simply scatter naked women’s bodies across the picture and act as if they were part of their supposedly very artistic and daring language images (but in fact they are just old-fashioned men’s images of women’s bodies ), Fargeat shows the naked bodies, especially those sexualized parts, over and over again and with exaggerated emphasis to parody the whole picture. Fargeat won the award for best screenplay for “The Substance.”

The feature debut “All We Imagine as Light” by the young Indian director Payal Kapadia, about three different but independent women who live and work in Mumbai, was particularly strong. With a calm narrative style, Kapadia creates a tender friendship and solidarity between these women. The film is also the story of the city of Mumbai, to which many people from all over India move in search of work and a better future. “All We Imagine as Light” received the Grand Jury Prize, the festival’s second most important award.