Jeremy Strong compares Cannes jury to 'Conclave with Champagne'
Jeremy Strong has compared serving on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival to "'Conclave' with Champagne".
The 'Succession' star was among the famous faces entrusted with picking the winners at the glitzy festival this year and he's revealed jury duty was comparable to the election of a new Pope in critically-acclaimed movie 'Conclave'.
According to Variety, Jeremy said during a press conference: "I feel immeasurably inspired by what I've seen here. It's been so invigorating, and this sort of cumulative tally of the work I'll carry with me ...
"This has been a really wonderful experience, a really connected experience with these people - it's like 'Conclave' with Champagne. It's really great."
The festival jury was led by president Juliette Binoche and also featured Halle Berry, Payal Kapadia, Hong Sansoo, Alba Rohrwacher, Leila Slimani, Dieudo Hamadi and Carlos Reygadas.
The festival's top prize - the Palme d'Or - was awarded to director Jafar Panahi's new drama 'It Was Just an Accident', which tells the story of a group of former prisoners in Iran who plot their revenge on a man they believe was a guard who tortured them behind bars.
Binoche said of the film: "It's very human and political at the same time because he comes from a complicated country, politically speaking.
"When we watched the film, it really stood out. The film springs from a feeling of resistance, survival, which is absolutely necessary today. So we thought it was important to give this film the paramount award.
"Art will always win. What is human will always win. Our creative urge can transform the world."
Strong added: "[We] wanted to recognize films that we felt were transcendent intrinsically as pieces of work ... Ibsen talked about: 'Deep inside, there's a poem in a poem. And when you hear that, when you grasp that, you will understand my song'.
"And I feel that this film and the other films have these poems within the poem that allow us to grasp something ineffable that have changed me."
Panahi previously admitted the film drew on his own personal experience of prison, telling the Guardian newspaper: "The first time I was in prison I was in solitary confinement.
"I was on my own in a tiny cell and they would take me out blindfolded to a place where I would sit in front of a wall and hear this voice at my back. It was the voice of the man who would question me – sometimes for two hours, sometimes for eight hours.
"And I would just hang on his voice all that time, fantasising about who this person was from his voice. And I had an intuition that someday this voice would be an aspect of something I'd write or shoot and give a creative life to.'
Speaking after winning the top prize at Cannes, the moviemaker said: "Let's put all the problems, all the differences aside; the most important thing right now is our country and our country's freedom.
"Let's reach that moment together when no one dares to tell us what we should completely include, what we should say, what we shouldn't do… Cinema is a society. No one has the right to tell us what you should do, what you shouldn't do."
The festival's second prize - the the Grand Prix – went to 'Sentimental Value' starring Stellan Skarsgard and the Jury Prize was a tie between ' Sound of Falling' and 'Sirat' while the Camera d'Or award went to 'The President's Cake'.
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When Jafar Panahi attended the Cannes Film Festival with his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, it was the first time the renowned director had been allowed to leave Iran in 15 years. Even after years of prosecutions, house arrest and two spells in prison, he said the most exciting thing about this sudden rush of liberty was being able to see one of his films, which are all banned in his home country, in a cinema. 'Watching the film with other people and telling myself, 'Oh wow, you were able to watch one of your films with other people!' And, of course, seeing the audience finding a rapport.' An intense rapport, as it turned out: on the closing night of the festival, Panahi was presented with the top prize, the Palme d'Or, by specially invited Cate Blanchett. Introducing the award, jury president Juliette Binoche said cinema and art are 'provocative' and mobilise 'a force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life', which was why the jury had chosen Panahi's film. Predictably, Panahi's persecutors back in Iran didn't see it quite that way; the state television station condemned It Was Just An Accident as 'lies and smearing', while the victory caused a small but fiery diplomatic spat between Iran and France. 'I am not an art expert,' sneered foreign ministry representative Esmaeil Baqaei, 'but we believe that artistic events and art in general should not be exploited to pursue political objectives'. Like all the films Panahi has made in his years as persona non grata, It Was Just an Accident was shot and edited in secret, without the required official permits. 'I had to work in total secrecy, with only my very close crew being aware of the subject of the film and of the content of the script.' There was no point, he says, in applying for clearance to make what is perhaps his angriest film yet – and his strangest, in that it is a comedy caper about torturers and the tortured. It follows a garage mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasser), who hears in the garage the uneven footsteps of his former torturer, whom he never saw through his blindfold but whom he knew had an artificial leg. He could never forget the sound of that dragging foot. Vahid becomes judge and jury. What punishment could fit this man's crimes? If, indeed, it was this man. Having kidnapped him, intending to bury him alive in the desert, Vahid starts to have doubts. Bundling his catch into his van, he goes to consult his friend and mentor, a scholarly bookshop owner, who asks him with some asperity whether he is really up for burying someone alive. But he doesn't want to decide anything; for that, he should ask the photographer who was raped by this man, who turns out to be doing a wedding shoot that day with a couple of other torture victims. Did any of them see their interrogator? No. Bride, groom and photographer join his posse, with a firm ID still no closer. It Was Just an Accident walks a knife-edge between horror and humour, which Panahi says is a very Iranian approach to the world. 'Iranians really are that way. You will be having a very serious argument about something very difficult and 10 minutes later you're having a joke about it,' he says. 'No political entity has ever been able to rid us of it and, of course, when it is included in a film, it makes the film more real.' The Islamic Republic has tried to stamp out festivals and fun of all kinds, without ever managing it. 'Just like, despite imposing the mandatory headscarf time and again, they haven't been able to stop our very progressive, courageous women.' Nothing has stopped Panahi, either. Back in 2010, he was sentenced to six years in jail for supporting anti-government protesters and creating 'propaganda against the system'. He served only two months, but he was banned from travelling outside Iran and from making films. His response was to make This Is Not a Film, a polemic on the nature of film-making shot entirely in his home on his iPhone, which made it to international festivals on a USB stick baked into a cake. Tehran Taxi (2015) was shot surreptitiously inside a moving car. It went on, in Panahi's very conspicuous absence, to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2022, he was arrested again when he asked awkward questions about the fate of two other imprisoned filmmakers and, as a consequence, was ordered to serve the rest of his 2010 sentence. 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This is, for example, the first of his films to show women with their hair uncovered, which he says reflects the fact that when he was released from prison, what struck him was the number of women in public without headscarves. The characters in the film reflect different stances – one who speaks in slogans, another who is more conciliatory – reflecting the real-life characters he met in prison. 'I even allowed an interrogator to speak for himself, and explain his ideology, his aims.' The Iranian authorities, needless to say, take a different view. Panahi started his film-making career making television and as an assistant director to Abbas Kiarostami. His first film as a director, The White Balloon, was a gentle story of slum children that won the Camera d'Or in Cannes in 1995. The Iranian film authority duly nominated The White Balloon as the country's Oscar entry, then decided it was critical of the regime and banned Panahi from travelling to the United States or speaking to the press. By the time he came to make The Circle, a round of interlocking stories about Iranian women that won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2000, he was officially on the outer. The Circle, along with all his subsequent films, was banned in Iran. Loading The experience of interrogation, remembered by various characters in It Was Just an Accident, echoes his own. During his months of imprisonment, he was questioned for hours every day as to why he would make the films he does. He imitates their tirades. ''You're selling out! You're giving your country a bad reputation! You are a traitor!'' A lot of discussion, he says with irony. Like the people in his film, he is haunted by that disembodied voice. 'When the interrogator has sat you very close to the wall, blindfolded you in such a way that you can only see enough from the corner of your eye to write on a piece of paper and is standing behind you, you do wonder: who is this? What does he look like, how old is he, what does he believe?' Loading In theory, Panahi's suspended sentence is now officially served, and he should be free to apply for permission to make films legitimately. 'I think I just did what my sentence required, which was that I was banned from film-making for 20 years,' he says. 'I did 16 years of it; I think they could not renew this sentence as it came to an end.' But that doesn't mean he has been given more latitude. He will continue to film in secret; as he said in an interview with Variety during the festival, the authorities make up laws as they go. Will he be arrested again? Or confined to home? Nothing is certain, except that Jafar Panahi will continue, one way or another, to make films.
