Time’s Up on the Croisette: #MeToo at Cannes

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Features

Published on Wednesday, 16 May 2018 10:24

Written by Marian Masone

Since the Festival de Cannes seemed to be ground zero for at least one sexual predator (Harvey Weinstein), much focus as been put on the festival to change its ways, not just in terms of women’s safety, but by incorporating many more women filmmakers in the festival.

While there were only three female directors in the competition – or maybe because there were only three female directors in the competition – parity in the field was a recurring theme throughout the festival. Panels on women and the film industry were everywhere: the American Pavilion hosted a panel entitled Hollywood in the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp on May 16th. Moderated by Melissa Silverstein of Women & Hollywood, guests included casting director Pamela Guest, a casting director who is on the SAG-AFTRA board and part of its Sexual Harassment Workgroup; Yolanda Brinkley, creator of the Diversity Symposium, a short film showcase in Cannes and Dionne Audain, an actor who appears in a short film, “I Am My Own Mother” in the Cannes official selection. Not a part of the festival, Brinkley’s event aims to help those who feel as outsiders at the festival – and there are many of them – feel as though they do belong at this convention of the industry.

The talk at the American Pavilion was focused on protection of actors, at work and also at the casting level and, as its title indicates with a focus on the U.S. Hollywood system. For a broader view, there was an official panel in the Salon des Ambassades, inside the Palais, entitled Take Two: Next Steps for Me Too three days prior, on May 13. Melissa Silverstein was there again but she was joined by an international panel of woman and men. Alice Bahkuhnke, Sweden’s Minister for Culture and Democracy, talked about Sweden’s affirmative feminist government: for a number of years, that country has built parity into arts and media funding, for one thing. Still, she’s angry that this equality still has to be legislated – “we have to do this to make it happen,” she declared. Looking for the day, I suppose, when laws aren’t necessary. But I don’t think that day will ever come.

Anna Serner, CEO of the Swedish Film Institute, talked about determining the quality of projects they fund. They look at relevance, originality, production values and craft. So, not just “I have a feeling.” As they’re finalizing projects, they look at the percentage of women associated with the projects to see how they’re doing and then make adjustments, if necessary, to fit into the parity laws.

Stacy Smith, founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at USC (which has been studying women in the media issues for years), talked about many of the studies the Annenberg Center has done (on percentages of women in front of and behind the camera, for instance) and they follow up these studies to see if there’s any movement. To counter bias in the film industry, the Center has fought to have inclusion riders about hiring in all contracts – and they’ve won that fight.

She also spoke about shifting the perception of what leadership is, or even, how a good leader acts. And she pushed to do this early on in one’s career in the industry, or even before. She wants to foster  belonging at film schools, to make everyone feel that they are wanted, that they belong. Good thoughts, but it sounds remarkably like speeches given a generation ago – and that only got us to here.

Filmmaker Aida Begilc, another panelist, made the most cogent commnet of the day: “Privilege is not visible to those who have it.” The one male on the panel, Cameron Bailey, Co-Head of the Toronto Film Festival, seemed to see privilege, but then, he is a person of color, so doesn’t have all the privilege! As for personnel at TIFF, he said it’s not difficult to have majority women on a staff, you just do it. His programming team boasts twelve females and nine males. At Toronto, they also question what is quality, as well as questioning the stories being told – are they coming from a diverse perspective?

Panels only go so far. To draw attention to the problem, 82 women in the film industry – actors, directors, sales agents, distributors – stood en masse on the red carpet of the Palais on Saturday May 12th before the premiere screening of one of the three female-directed films in the competition, Eva Husson’s “Girls of the Sun.” The 82 women stood in stark contrast to the number of men who have climbed these steps with films in competition over the course of 71 editions of the festival: 1,688.

With Cate Blanchett, the jury president, speaking in English, and veteran filmmaker Agnes Varda speaking in French, they read a statement that demanded diverse and equitable workplaces, in addition to more women filmmakers represented at the festival’s official programs.

Two days later, on May 14th, Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux, as well as the heads of the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week, signed the 50/50 – 2020 pledge to have equal representation of women filmmakers in their competitions by 2020. They also pledged transparency in the process. This all sounds promising, but they only have two years to do it; let’s see what happens.

Art at the 2017 Berlinale

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Features

Published on Tuesday, 02 January 2018 17:20

Written by Marian Masone

Film being the seventh art, all moving image falls under this category. But there are numerous ways that art is expressed, even at a film festival. At the 2017 Berlinale, art was present in all forms. Art films, films about artists – fiction and non-fiction – as well as museum exhibits.

There are, obviously, many museums in Berlin, all with their own programs that have nothing to do with film or the film festival. In fact, the Staatliche Museen, or State Museum, is a group of 17 institutions throughout the city, focusing on different areas and including libraries and research facilities. And of course, some have nothing to do with art, but with history, science, etc. However, from time to time there are exhibits at art museums that run concurrently, or take advantage of the festival’s presence and timing to install filmic projects.

One example was “The Gold Projections,” an installation by American artist Joe Ramirez was in the Exhibition Hall at the Kulturforum, one of the Berlin state museums. Ramirez is an American artist who has studied in Chicago (at the Art Institute of Chicago) and London (at the Royal College of Art), and who now lives and works in Berlin.

For "The Gold Projections," Ramirez projects film onto wooden panels that he gilds by hand to create a 3D surface that affects how the projected film is seen. The projections take place in a darkened room so it becomes a total, meditative environment. The moving images are abstract, and some appear as thought they were giants gems floating in space. You could call this animation, but it is so much more. His work is reminiscent of fresco painters of the Italian Renaissance,

At the festival itself, there are many art films of course, but this year two films in the official selection highlighted two different artists, Joseph Beuys and Alberto Giacometti: one as a narrative feature, the other a straight documentary.

A documentary in the competition,“Beuys,” by film and theater director and writer Andres Veiel does a workman-like job of presenting the biography of this ground breaking artist, with a special focus on those years in the late 70s, early 80s in New York when creativity sprouted from every crevice of sidewalk. (Literally: take a look at “Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat” by Sara Driver).

This is a great film for a viewer who doesn’t know Joseph Beuysor his work. But it doesn’t always go deep into his work or his artistic philosophy. Nonetheless, good use is made of archival footage – showing his installations and also freewheeling talks that he gave at the time.

Veiel takes us through various phases of Beuys’ life, including time his younger days, and his time in the Luftwaffe during WWII when he was injured in a plane crash. Even that injury speaks to his later work as an artist, but still Veiel paints Beuys with very broad brush strokes.

Actor/director  has only directed a handful of films, but each seems like a special project, tenderly wrought (some more so than others). His fifth directorial effort,“Final Portrait,” is taken from writer James Lord’s book “A Giacometti Portrait” that focuses on one act, as it were, of Alberto Giacometti.

The Swiss artist achieved fame with his sculptures, but he also painted, of course, and the film follows a period when Lord sat for the Swiss artist in Paris. What was supposed to be an afternoon became a few days and turned into weeks as Giacometti painted and re-painted Lord in his studio in 1960s Paris.

Geoffrey Rush plays Giacometti and Armie Hammer plays his subject and biographer, James Lord (Lord wrote another book on Giacometti as well as a Picasso biography). But while Giacometti puts Lord’s image on canvas, Lord is observing and capturing more than a sitting. He captures the essence of the artist, and of the time in which he lived. “Final Portrait” is a “small” film, but it harnesses a large life.

“Beuys” was presented in competition and “Final Portrait” out of competition. Both were picked up for U.S. distribution (“Beuys” by Kino Lorber; “Final Portrait” by Sony Pictures Classics), and due for release in the States in 2018. No word on whether Ramirez’s “The Gold Projections” will be seen outside of Germany any time soon.

End of the Road: The Prizes at Cannes 2017

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Features

Published on Thursday, 01 June 2017 11:08

Written by Marian Masone

The Beguiled

Do the awards tell us anything about the upcoming season in cinema? Or are they simply a collection of prizes that may or may not help a film through the churning waters of exhibition?

The Cannes 2017 competition jury included four women: American actor Jessica Chastain, French filmmaker Agnes Jaoui, German director Maren Ade, and Chinese actor Fan Bingbing, and five men: American actor Will Smith, directors Paolo Sorentino from Italy and Park Chan-wook from Korea, French-Lebanese composer Gabriel Yared, and Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, who served as president.

The male/female ratio of the jury is in line with past juries, as a cursory look at juries from the last dozen or so years. There may be three to four women each year - but never more than four, by the way, so men are always in the majority. Just sayin.’ So it wasn’t equal opportunity pressure that made Sofia Coppola only the second female to receive the best director prize (the first was Yuliya Solntseva for ‘The Chronicle of Flaming Years’ in 1961 - remember her?). Or maybe it was. 56 years? And, by the way, Jane Campion is still the only female Palme d’or winner, for ‘The Piano’ in 1993. Coppola was sure to mention Campion as an inspiration.

Coppola won for ‘The Beguiled, ‘ her rendition of Thomas P. Cullinan's ‘A Painted Devil,’ a story first brought to the screen by Don Siegel. Coppola came under fire because of the absence of black characters in a Civil War tale, but she has explained again and again her reasons, so in my view she’s acquired herself.

I have never seen the 1971 version - Clint Eastwood stars and, sorry, I’ve never been a fan. Now that he’s become a doddering conservative apologist, I’m happy to see I’ve been on the correct side of cinematic politics! In any event, Coppola tells her story from the point of view of the women in the house. It stars Nicole Kidman and the cast also includes Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning and a young Addison Riecke, with Colin Farrell as the hapless soldier Riecke discovers.

Other women felt the love at the awards ceremony, in addition to Diane Kruger winning best actress for ‘In the Fade’ - no male competition in this category! Nicole Kidman won a special 70th anniversary award (just for being her, I guess, as well as all the Cannes films she’s appeared in). And the Camera d’Or for best first feature, went to Leonor Serraille for her Un Certain Regard entry ‘Jeune Femme.’

British filmmaker Lynne Ramsey shared the screenplay prize with Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. Ramsey’s film, ‘You Were Never Really Here’ stars Joaquin Phoenix as a disturbed killer for hire who puts himself out to save a teenage girl.

As for the rest of the awards, the boys were back in town. Not that many of the awards weren’t well-deserved. Joaquin Phoenix won best actor for his turn in ‘You Were Never Really Here,’ mentioned above. And ‘Loveless,’ a wrenching drama of a missing child of extremely dysfunctional parents by Andrey Zvyagintsev received the jury prize. Grand prize went to Robin Campillo’s touching story of Act Up in France, ‘120 Beats per Minute.’

The grand prize and jury prize can be seen as second and third place, respectively, and are not always awarded. The Palme d’Or is awarded every year, and this year it went to Ruben Ostlund’s uncomfortable social examination, ‘The Square.’ Proving that the boys always win? That art always wins? Proving nothing, actually, except to show the choices of a conscientious group of jurors. They can go home happy to have discharged their duties!