Women-majority jury, glitz, glamour and politics: 78th Cannes film festival opens
Political hot spots. And high heels. Only at one film festival can both these issues become talking points at a jury press conference, and that's Cannes.
The 78th edition of the Cannes festival, where glitz and glamour is taken as seriously as all things film, presented its feature film jury which boasts five women, including India's Payal Kapadia, as well as the jury president Juliette Binoche, Halle Berry, French-Moroccan journalist Leila Slimani, and Italian actor Alba Rohrwacher. The others are 'Succession' star Jeremy Strong, the astonishingly prolific South Korean director Hong Sang Soo, Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas and documentary filmmaker from Congo, Dieudo Hamadi.
Not just stilettos, but 'nudity' and 'voluminous dresses that hinder the proper flow of traffic of guests' have officially been sanctioned at the red carpet this year. Binoche was forthcoming on the former, welcoming the move, but was strangely reticent when asked pointedly why she refused to sign a letter on the ongoing Gaza conflict, saying that people will understand her decision 'later'. When pressed, she declined to answer.
Kapadia, quite the Cannes darling with her student film and documentary having been presented at the festival, and with her debut 'All We Imagine As Light' having won the Grand Prix last year, said that, 'as a cinephile', she was greatly looking forward to her jury stint. The warm reception of the world press to an Indian film at this very festival, she said, helped it get noticed and facilitated a release back home.
Donald Trump's whammy on 100 per cent tariffs on foreign-produced films, which has thrown the global film community into a state of disarray, also came up for discussion. At the opening press conference on Sunday, festival director Thierry Fremaux said that he didn't want to comment, because the US President is known to roll back many of his orders.
Binoche felt that Trump's move was to 'save America' and its film industry, which is being impacted by global recessionary trends. Strong, who played the crafty Roy Kohn, the powerful lawyer who shaped Trump's rise and rise in Ali Abbasi's biopic 'The Apprentice' ( which premiered at the Competition section in 2024 ), said that his character was the 'progenitor of fake news, and we're living in the aftermath of what he created'.
Fremaux's admiration for big American cinema is well-known. Tom Cruise, whose Mission Impossible- Dead Reckoning Part One had premiered out of competition in 2023, is back with The Final Reckoning ( it is releasing globally this week). Veteran Hollywood star Robert De Niro is being honoured with an honorary Palme d'Or, to be given away by Leonardo diCaprio, the pair having acted alongside each other last in Martin Scorcese's 'Killers Of The Flower Moon', which was part of the official selection in 2023.
The opening film of the 12-day festival is being touted as a significant first. Amelie Bonnin's French dramady 'Leave One Day', featuring singer-songwriter Juliette Armanet and Bastien Bouillon, is the first debut feature to open Cannes. Just like Bollywood, it has characters breaking into song and dance, but Bonnin has gone on record saying 'it is not a musical; that the music is used as an integral supplementary device'.
Unlike 2025, with several films in the official selection, as well as Kapadia's win, there are slimmer Indian pickings this year. Neeraj Ghaywan returns to Cannes with his second feature 'Homebound', starring Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa and Janhvi Kapoor : his debut ' Masaan' was in 'Un Certain Regard' section in 2015.
The classics section will screen the restored version of Satyajit Ray's classic modernist fable 'Aranyer Din Ratri' (Days and Nights in the Forest), with co-stars Sharmila Tagore and Simi Garewal in attendance, and will be presented by Wes Anderson, a huge Ray devotee. This one should be special.
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