Action movies and outrage vie for space at Cannes Film Festival
Many stars are unwilling to be quiet about how tariffs will affect the film industry
As the 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival got under way this week, the dark political clouds overhead could not be ignored. This is Cannes after all. The festival began in the 1930s as a protest against the Venice Film Festival, which in 1939 invited Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as its guest of honour and gave a special “Mussolini cup” to Hitler’s favourite documentarian, Leni Riefenstahl.
Its inaugural edition was scheduled for September 1 1939, but was cancelled because German tanks were rolling into Poland. Since 1946 Cannes has been the annual movie industry event at which celebrities are expected to comment on global events. This has become more a case of radical chic than the demonstration of political commitment that drove French New Wave mavericks Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut when they stormed the festival’s main hall in May 1968 in solidarity with the students of Paris...
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