The Cannes Film Festival was denounced for promoting cultural apartheid by the Reverend Jesse Jackson yesterday.
“There must be more African-American films being shown here. There are none this year,” said Mr Jackson, making his first visit to the wealthy Riviera resort. “And there must be a greater commitment here to those small and poorer nations who have great stories to tell but limited means to tell them.
“We want to challenge the officials of Cannes to tell those stories. There are awful challenges in front of us – the Aids epidemic needs to be explained on screen, and other great human stories cry out to be told.” Jackson, founder of the Rainbow Coalition and still the most prominent black voice in US politics, diverted attention briefly from La Croisette’s parade of D-list celebrities when he posed for pictures on the beach at the American Pavilion.
While Hollywood producers cut multi-million dollar deals inside the American Pavilion, outside Jackson railed against the money men who, he claimed, spiritually impoverished the festival. “We’ve come to Cannes to denounce the cultural apartheid that reflects money not so much as talent,” he said.
“There are too many untold stories from the human family and Cannes isn’t helping to change that. We should see ourselves as a global family. In Cannes you get the same stories told again and again. We must figure out a way to broaden the lenses. If we see things through a narrow focus covering the same people over and over again, we don’t get to understand the most important issues.
“Producers too often see the world through a keyhole when they should be walking through the door. If they don’t realise that these untold stories need to be told in the end it will be they who suffer since they need to widen their base. They need to invest in new stories which will give them a good return.”
Jackson, 59, came to Cannes for yesterday’s world premiere of the film The Country Preacher: Keeping Hope Alive. It is a video diary about a year in his life from 1999 to 2000. It includes footage from his days as a student leader 40 years ago and gives details of his fight against George W Bush’s decision to execute the alleged murderer Gary Graham in Texas in June last year.
There is also a report on the presidential election debacle in Florida and his calls for electoral reform.
While organisers will be aware that not one of the 23 films up for the Palme d’Or is made by a black film-maker, Mr Jackson’s attack on Cannes was widely ignored in this citadel of privilege.
However, there are films from Iran (Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar, for instance, is a critique of the Taliban’s oppression of women in Afghanistan), Japan (including a tale about a millennial cult massacre) and other Asian countries.
But, while European, American and Asian cinema are well represented at Cannes, black film-makers are not.
Jackson’s comments on the need for a more social conscience will be defended.
However, the festival can hardly be accused of peddling trite cinema on well-worn themes. The Iranian Abbas Kiarostami’s documentary about Aids in Uganda was screened for the first time last week in Cannes.
Entitled ABC Africa, it chronicles the director’s 10 days in the country. It was made at the request of the UN’s international fund for agricultural development to highlight the plight of thousands of African children who have become orphans as a result of the Aids epidemic there.
Yesterday also saw the world premiere of Claude Lanzmann’s film Sobibor, October 14, 1943 – about the only successful uprising in a Nazi death camp.
There was also the world premiere of Hijack Stories, a film made by a white Afrikaner and set in the South Arican black township of Soweto. It tells the story of a young black actor called Sox, whose profession ostracises him from his native community. In order to research the role of a black gangster in a television series he enlists the help of a childhood friend who teaches him the ways of the black underworld.