Bono debuts documentary at Cannes, criticises US aid cuts
For Bono, the U2 frontman used to performing at sold-out arenas, being without his bandmates on a sparsely decorated stage for his one-man show, now the subject of the new Apple TV+ documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender, feels unfamiliar.
"You come from 250 Mack Trucks to a table and chairs. But that's the attraction of it for me," Bono told Reuters ahead of the documentary's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday evening.
He was joined on the red carpet by his wife Ali and their children Jordan and Elijah.
The Andrew Dominik-directed black-and-white film is based on Bono's memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, and accompanying tour, where the singer reflects on fatherhood, religion, death, politics, and his band's decades of performing.
Among the guests at the premiere were members of Ukraine's armed forces, Bono's U2 bandmate The Edge, the actors Sean Penn and Kristen Stewart, and the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.
The Apple TV+ documentary, which can be streamed from 30 May, is the first feature-length film that can be watched in Apple Immersive Video with the company's Vision Pro wearable headset device.
"It's a story about fathers. It's my relationship with my actual father. It's my life as a father," Bono said.
"And then it's this relationship with my Father in Heaven, whatever you want to call that force of love and logic behind the Universe."
Bono, who has long campaigned for debt relief, aid, and better trade for Africa, said that he thought of his father's voice when he looked back at the 1985 Live Aid charity concert for Ethiopian famine relief that was also pivotal to launching U2 into superstar territory.
"My father would say, 'If the world was just, you wouldn't need charity'. So we had to push through Live Aid," said the singer about the event organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure that raised hundreds of millions.
Bono said that US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the world's richest man, are squandering the potential of millions of people by making huge cuts to US foreign aid spending, "with glee, it would appear".
He added that it was an unwise policy - as well as "the definition of the absence of love".
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