The 71st Cannes Film Festival started last Tuesday.
As you must know if you usually read
this blog, I often pay attention to the official poster of this festival
because it is one of the features that characterises and even distinguishes
this festival from other film festivals around the world. The taste and the
elegance with which the organisers of the festival choose the image which will
become the poster of the festival can also be observed in other aspects of the
festival. Some people may argue that those aspects are not so relevant and that
the glamourous image that the festival projects can´t be diminished or obscured
by the fact that the actors ot the guests of the festival take selfies on the
red carpet – something which has been prohibited this year – but I guess that the organisers have just made a
point of trying to preserve the atmosphere of the old times when the only
photos which were taken were the ones that the professional photographers as
well as the paparazzi managed to take: sought-after photographs which would
appear in the press or on TV without the immediacy of our contemporary social
media.
The poster features a woman and a man engaged in a
passionate kiss, an image taken from Jean-Luc Godard´s Pierrot le Fou (1965); the author of the photograph was the renowed
photographer Georges Pierre (1927-2003).
The opening film of this year´s festival has been “Todos lo saben” (Everybody knows), a psychological thriller directed by the Iranian
film-maker Asghar Farhadi but the production and the main cast of the film are Spanish.
I think that it is also worth mentioning that yesterday
there was a women´s protest on the Cannes red carpet: 82 women stood in silence
to highlight the lack of female directors at the festival. The gesture was
intended to signify the difficulties for women “to climb the social and
professional ladder”.
On this occasion, I´d like to use this post to pay
tribute to a Spanish film-maker who died yesterday at the age of 82: Antonio
Mercero. He is the only Spanish director who has ever won an Emmy Award for a
film and he achieved one thanks to his film “La cabina” (The phone booth)
in 1972 but apart from his films, he will always be remembered for his
successful TV series which made a big difference in the history of Spanish
television. Antonio Mercero had been diagnosed with Alzheimer´s a long time
ago and he was honoured with a Goya life-achievement Award in 2010.
Sometimes the stories depicted in the films that we watch
take us to glamorous settings, like the Promenade de la Croisette which is full
of film stars these days but at other times, the stories take us to ordinary places such as a phone booth, a coastal
village in the south of Spain, the chemist´s of our neighbourhood, a children´s hospital or a home for
the elderly. Because, perhaps, the most important thing is not the setting of
the story but the ability to portray the characters and their stories – painful
stories on occasions – with tenderness and even with humour.
