Arson, dissidents and jabs at Trump: The biggest moments from the 78th Cannes Film Festival

Sydney Morning Herald

25-05-2025

Overall, it was a good festival for young women. The Dardenne brothers' Young Mothers, about a group of girls in a Belgian shelter for single mothers, won best script. The Little Sister star Nadia Melliti won best actress for her portrayal of a teenage girl in a traditional Moroccan family living in France who realises she is attracted to women. And the superb German film Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski, about four women living in different eras on a remote farm, shared the jury prize with Sirat, by French director Oliver Laxe, which kicks off at a rave in the Moroccan desert, where the drugged-up dancers have little idea that war is on the doorstep.
And so much more that was worth seeing, even if it didn't win anything. Keep eyes peeled for Julie Ducournau's Alpha, her follow-up to Titane and just as confrontingly weird; Romería, Carla Simon's semi-autobiographical search for the story of her parents, who died of AIDS in '80s Spain; and the glorious Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater's French-language imagining of the making of Jean-Luc Godard's pivotal film Breathless. Watching young French actor Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, permanently behind sunglasses and smoking like a tramp steamer, was one of Cannes' greatest pleasures.
Trading places
Three debut films by big-name actors screened in various sections of the festival: enough to constitute a trend. Scarlett Johansson's Eleanor the Great, starring 95-year-old June Squibb as an American-born Jew who passes herself off as a Holocaust survivor to make new friends, was not a hit: critics found itsentimental, offensively cloth-eared about the significance of survivor status or, in the worst reviews, both.
Kristen Stewart's The Chronology of Water, a young woman's tortured story of survival, was emotionally raw but formally complex – all rapid cuts, odd angles and muddled timescales – in a way that puts it out of the running for multiplex play. The most warmly received was Urchin by Harris Dickinson – the beefcake boy from Triangle of Sadness – whose film featured a bravura performance by Frank Dillane as a London street-dweller. Definitely watch out for that one.
Political realities
Robert De Niro set the tone for this year's festival on opening night, where he used his acceptance speech for an honorary Palme d'Or to have a dig at the ' philistine president ' of the United States where people 'are fighting like hell for the democracy we once took for granted'.
President Donald Trump's mooted 100 per cent tariffs on films 'made in foreign lands' didn't seem to dampen the market, which exists to sell films internationally and enable co-production deals. But it drew scorn from director Wes Anderson in a press conference for his typically whimsical film The Phoenician Scheme.
'The tariff is fascinating because of the 100 per cent. I feel this means Trump is saying he's going to take all the money,' he mused acidly. He also wondered whether a movie could be held up in customs. 'I feel it doesn't ship that way.'
Cannes continued to declare its support for Ukraine, including an entire day of documentaries about its continuing resistance to the Russian invasion, while more than 900 actors and filmmakers signed an open letter condemning the continuing Israeli onslaught on Gaza, declaring themselves 'ashamed' of their industry's 'passivity' in the face of the siege.
On the opening night, Jury president Juliette Binoche paid tribute to photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who was killed in an Israeli air strike the day after learning that a documentary about her work, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, had been chosen to screen in Cannes. Hassouna's portrait hung in the press room for the festival's duration.
But perhaps the most vivid political presence was Julian Assange, who posed for the cameras wearing a white T-shirt inscribed 'Stop Israel' and bearing the names of 4986 Palestinian children killed in Gaza. He was in Cannes to support Eugene Jarecki's documentary about his work, The Six Billion Dollar Man.
Cannes craziness
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Before the power failure, the biggest disaster on the Croisette came right at the beginning, when tumultuous winds blew down one of the Riviera beach's famous palm trees, injuring a passing Japanese producer.
The natural world isn't usually much of a felt presence in Cannes, but there was a more cheerful story about one of the biggest luxury hotels, the Majestic, employing a falconer and team of hawks to chase away seagulls that dive-bomb celebrity plates and have been known to make off with entire lobsters.
Shark attack
Australia didn't have a film in competition, but Sean Byrne's bloody genre romp Dangerous Animals had a triumphant showing in the parallel program of the Directors' Fortnight before its release in Australia next month. Women screamed as Jai Courtney, playing an ocker villain obsessed with shark behaviour, dangled his kidnapped shark bait over the side of his tour boat.