Controversy is as commonplace at the Cannes Film Festival as the flash of cameras on the red carpet.
Often the controversies are sartorial—bare-footed women, like Kristen Stewart, protesting the required high-heels—or simply inexplicable, as when the Danish director Lars von Trier blurted out in 2011 that he was a Nazi.
They have also been political, as in 2018 when 82 female directors and actresses—symbolically representing the total number of films directed by women that had ever been accepted for competition in the festival’s history, as opposed to 1,645 by men—protested gender inequality at the festival.
This year, though, Cannes was the stage for a protest that was not just political, but also ideological, perhaps even existential.
On the eve of the festival’s opening, the newspaper Libération published an open letter signed by more than 600 French actors, directors, producers and screenplay writers, in which they condemned what they described as the “reactionary civilizational project” spearheaded by reclusive billionaire Vincent Bolloré.
