CANNES REPORT Serious Issues by the Sea Israeli and Palestinian films make politics an issue at the festival.
By RACHEL ABRAMOWITZ, Times Staff Writer
CANNES, France--Film festivals don't usually rank with Oslo or Camp David as milestones on the path to peace, but this year the Cannes Film Festival is rife not only with the usual jury politicking, but with films bursting with real-life politics.
When announcing the festival lineup, artistic director Thierry Fremaux made a point of saying it was presenting a Palestinian film, "Divine Intervention," and also an Israeli one, "Kedma," as a step toward peace.
"The one thing that remains liberated and free is the imagination," says "Divine Intervention" star and director Elia Suleiman, whose film is the first Palestinian movie ever in competition here.
Sprinkled throughout the main competition and several side competitions are films about anti-globalization protests and Algerian terrorists, as well as "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore's documentary about America's love affair with the gun, and "Ararat," Atom Egoyan's revelatory examination of the Armenian genocide by the Turks in 1915 and how its whitewashing out of history affects a young Canadian Armenian. Turkey officially denies that the genocide of more than a million Armenians happened. The film has been the subject of Internet-bred fury, and rumors of an incipient Turkish boycott have been brewing.
Political concerns extended to the festival as well. Responding to international fears of terrorism--and recent acts of anti-Semitic violence in France--security at the festival has been tighter this year than in the past, with police checking bags at the main venues and using bomb-sniffing dogs at the railway stations. Crowds were lighter than usual, but observers attributed this to a slow economy rather than terrorism jitters.
Journalists from around the world who gathered here peppered filmmakers with political questions, often repeatedly when some artists, such as Israel's Amos Gitai or Egoyan, refused to be drawn into the fray, preferring to speak through their work. Even Woody Allen, determinedly apolitical throughout more than 30 years of filmmaking, was asked about his sentiments on the Middle East and violence against Jews in France, presumably because he is famously Jewish. His noncommittal answer was criticized by the American Jewish Congress.
One might expect a cacophony of different voices from the disparate films, but they tend to conform to pro-Palestinian sentiment in France. Yet, unlike Hollywood studio products, the films here attempt to provoke and entertain, to seize back political discourse from the monotone clutches of CNN and show the effects of politics and history on the human spirit.
Absurdist Humor in a Palestinian Film
"Divine Intervention" is dotted with inspired flights of fancy and absurdist humor--a casually thrown peach pit explodes an Israeli tank, and a flying Palestinian ninja girl, complete with Yasser Arafat-style head scarf, takes on Israeli soldiers who wield their Uzis with the grace and synchronization of Busby Berkeley dancers.
Hany Abu-Assad, director of another Palestinian film being shown here (though not in competition) called "Rana's Wedding," said that "when we make more culture, we'll make less bullets." Like Suleiman, Abu-Assad uses the military checkpoints between Ramallah and Israel as a prime motif in his movie, which is about a young woman whose father arbitrarily demands she marry that day, setting off her ardent quest to find a lover in the next 10 hours. The $600,000 film--any profits will go back to what's left of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture--sets the appealing heroine's middle-class marital aspirations and ambivalences against the difficulties of life in East Jerusalem and what Abu-Assad portrays as the day-to-day harshness of the Israeli government.
"When the occupation becomes daily life, normal life becomes fiction," Abu-Assad says. "You have to do a lot of things to make your life go on."
Suleiman says that absurdist humor happens to be a key component of his sensibility, but he adds, "There's a tragic element that exists in my country, so people don't assume a sense of humor is part of it. But people have a very short memory circuit. In concentration camps, some of the best humor was invented by the Jews. Why is it immoral? That's one way of self-relief from the burden of death."
Director Amos Kitai's "Kedma," by contrast, is a somewhat polemical tale about the founding of Israel. A group of refugees from the Holocaust disembark from a boat from Europe and almost immediately take up arms against what Kitai depicts as defenseless Palestinians. "Israel is a country completely composed of displaced people, the Jews who were displaced from Europe and North Africa and the Palestinians who were displaced by the Israelis," Kitai says. "That is the tragedy but also the potential."
Kitai is Israel's most prolific and well-known filmmaker. His left-wing politics have made him a controversial figure, and during the '80s he even went into self-imposed exile in Paris, which ended when Yitzhak Rabin's minister of culture urged him to come home.
For Kitai, filmmaking is a needed corrective to what he calls "the television series which is called the evening news," a kind of long-running soap opera in which "one day the bad would be the Palestinians and the Israelis are angelic, and the next day it would be the opposite. We're getting tired of playing the roles of extras in this kind of scripted TV series which helps to sell washing machines during the commercial breaks."
Filmmaker Distrusts Historical Dramas
For Egoyan, history--and its representation--is disturbingly subjective, a fact that can lead to denial, which is the true theme of his film "Ararat."
He is by nature distrustful of historical dramas like "Schindler's List." "My problem with those movies is they try and create something that's so arresting that you can't help but feel it's absolutely true," Egoyan says. "I'm by nature suspicious of the images presented to me. Any representation has to be carefully considered. I always think these things that end up moving us are the things that are slightly more abstract, that aren't literal."
A potent, original voice, Egoyan has a following in the U.S. mainly from his transcendent 1997 film, "The Sweet Hereafter." Difficult to summarize, "Ararat" tells the story of Raffi, a production assistant on a film about the Armenian genocide. He is stopped on his way back from Turkey by a customs official (Christopher Plummer) suspicious of his sealed film cans. "Ararat" shifts through time, and features a film within a film as well as an interlude about Armenian painter Arshile Gorky and two disparate families trying to reconcile and connect despite their personal paths of denial.
At the news conference after the film, a Turkish journalist and film festival programmer proudly declared he was going to invite the film to be screened at the Istanbul film festival. But afterward, he told Egoyan privately that he would have to cut two scenes of vicious Turkish violence before the film could be shown. The official Turkish explanation is that violence in the region was a result of World War I and that many people died on both sides.
Despite the controversy swirling around his film, Egoyan is leery of reducing it to a simple political document. "I think the political statement is that denial affects people and these issues persist, but those are human statements," he says, although he adds, "There's a political statement being made in that it ascertains to me what is an empirical fact. There's no issue about the genocide. None. This question of fairness--hearing both sides of the story--is basically Turkish propaganda. They're able to manipulate that, and it infuriates me. No one would dare go to a German person and say, 'What's your perspective?'"
Egoyan adds that art plays an important role in healing the trauma. "Creation is the savior. If someone is desecrated, you respond by creating something that's sacred. You create art. You look at what's happening in Cambodia because they can't create art about their genocide. The people who did it are still in power. It's the creative impulse which gives hope."
Both Egoyan and Moore are established filmmakers, and theirs are the only politically minded films with U.S. distribution in place.
Suleiman's first film, "Chronicle of a Disappearance" (1996), did play in the United States, and he hopes his second one will too. "The problem will not be the American spectators," the director says. "It will be the [courage] of the distributor. Many places will be scared to show a film like that even if they thought it was good."
Indeed, while the political films at Cannes reflect French sensibilities, the ones that arrive in Los Angeles will undoubtedly reflect American ones. Miramax financed "Ararat" at the script stage and will be releasing the film stateside.
Just before he entered the "Ararat" premiere in Cannes, Miramax Chairman Harvey Weinstein fumed about the Turkish reaction. "They're trying to lobby in Washington. They're getting all upset. They're saying ... the whole movies is a PR thing. It never happened. What are they talking about? They're denying history. To me, the denial of the Armenian holocaust reminded me of the denial of our own Jewish Holocaust. I feel strongly about that."
<http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-052402abram.story> -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>