There is inevitably a simplistic side to bringing together such different countries and continents under any name – at the moment, we say “the South”, which is as open to criticism as the old names. But the way the world works, that of world cinema and that of the Cannes Festival, however, encourages us to consider the fate reserved for films that come neither from Europe, nor from North America, nor from Japan, nor from South Korea.
Of the 114 new feature films presented during this edition, twenty do not come from what is also questionably called the West. And it is particularly notable that no film from the “South” appears in the official competition, which attracts the most media and public attention.
More precisely, at Cannes we were able to see eight titles from Latin America (including Haiti), three from Asia excluding Japan and South Korea, four from Africa including two remarkable works mentioned earlier this week (Congo Boy And
Ben’imana), five from the Middle East, including the two documentaries by Iranian women in exile also mentioned here (The revolution will come And In the mouth of the ogre). For three-quarters of humanity, it’s a little meager, especially since we know that these parts of the world are today also very fertile in cinematographic offerings.
Without having been able to see all of the feature films concerned, we will refrain from making a generalizing comment, and will focus on a few truly memorable films. With the very notable exception of Strawberriesthey have at least in common, like a very large number of other Cannes titles, that they have the family as an essential framework and as the focus of issues and conflicts.
At least as the Cannes selectors constructed it, that the family horizon is thus almost the alpha and omega of a world cinema at a time of collective tragedies, wars, genocides, environmental catastrophe, pandemics, mass migration or the rise of fascism is not the least of the characteristics of this 79e edition of the Cannes Film Festival.
“Les Fraises”, by Laïla Marrakchi (Un certain regard)
“The most sweet” (“the sweetest”) is the name that appears on the crates of strawberries that come out of one of the many early plantations that make farmers prosperous in Andalusia, in the south of Spain. Sweet, these industrially produced strawberries are not that sweet. And the working conditions of those who harvest them are not gentle at all.
Moroccan women, who came completely legally and according to an agreement between the authorities of Morocco and Spain, live in sinister conditions… which are nothing original. This is how most of the fruits and vegetables that supply supermarkets throughout Europe are produced, to name but one.
What is original is them. They, Hasna and Meriem; she, Laïla Marrakchi, the Franco-Moroccan director of the film. The first two, main characters of the film, discover the fate reserved for them, under the orders of a foreman in the immense covered greenhouses, in the barracks where they are housed, or even in case one pleases the boss.
This is the starting frame, it is filmed with energy and attention, also welcoming a multiplicity of other protagonists. But that’s far from the whole film. Thanks to the director, and also to the screenwriter Delphine Agut, notably co-signer of the screenplay for The Story of Souleymane (2024), this chronicle will experience unexpected developments, which enrich both the understanding of the reality in which this initial situation takes place, and the dramatic quality and the singularity of characters with singular characteristics and energies, which unfold little by little.
So yes, Strawberriesfirst presented under the title La Más Dulceis a film “about” the production in unworthy conditions of our food, the exploitation of women and migrants. But it is also and first of all a film with. With its protagonists and the world of which they are a part.
“9 Temples to the Sky”, by Sompot Chidgasornpongse (Filmmakers’ Fortnight)
From the first images, while at dawn the different spaces of a Buddhist temple gradually light up, first in the dark, then the plastic chairs for the public are put in place, then a monk rehearses the funeral oration he will have to deliver, the first feature film by Thai director Sompot Chidgasornpong finds its singular tone.
Then accompanying the pilgrimage, which must therefore include nine stations, with a family gathered around a very elderly woman, 9 Temples to Heaven will never cease to associate the very concrete dimension of ritual practices, what is conventional if not hypocritical in the behavior of devotees and monks alike, the sadness and emotion that float among them as the end of their grandmother approaches, the comic or trivial aspects that accompany the rites and the offerings.
The accumulation, sometimes in gigantic proportions, of these offerings brought in large plastic bins – perishable foods, cleaning and hygiene products in standard assemblies sold in kits in department stores – is one of the aspects of this film which also shows that, in this society, the passage through the monastic condition is more of a social rite than a religious vocation.
Very present, the irony towards religious practices as towards the functioning of this large middle-class family whose journey we follow only takes on its full meaning and legitimacy through the tender and worried attention paid to details. It is the counterpart of the elegance of the way of filming the movement of vehicles between the temples, imposing buildings in the shape of golden wedding cakes and covered with kitsch ornamentation, and what evolves between the ten members of three generations.
Light, notably with a turning point in the family journey marked by a beautifully imaged solar eclipse, also plays a decisive role in establishing a relationship with oneself, with others, with death, with transmission, with the taking of a social place which is accomplished imperceptibly during the film.
At the feet of venerable people in a hurry to end things, to receive prebends or to leave their state, in vehicles which sometimes no longer follow the same route, it is a form of existence much richer than these adventures which is thus gently activated.
“Six months in the pink and blue house”, by Bruno Santamaría Razo (Critics Week)
We don’t really know what we see at first. Documentary or fiction? Today or thirty years ago? In this “pink house with blue” in Mexico that the original title designates (Six feet in the pink and blue building), it appears that a complicated and tragic story played out over six months in the 1990s, elements of which are shown on screen, first through reenactments performed, alternating with the same people, filmed in the present. We don’t really know what we’re seeing and it doesn’t matter at all.
Because the documentary in the present begins with a wild party, where everyone (parents and children) is made up, disguised and often changing their sexual appearance. Joyful and yet full of tensions, which we only untangle imperfectly, it doesn’t matter, the documentary farandole helps to tell – in the mode of a performed reconstruction – the crisis experienced by the family of the director, Bruno Santamaría Razo, at the time when his father, an inveterate runner and bisexual who no longer got along at all with his mother, turned out to be a carrier of AIDS.
In the land of great dances of death, the young Mexican filmmaker activates a filmic saraband which has so much to do with death, pain and anguish, but where an incredible vital energy circulates.
In addition to the present documentary and fiction reconstituting the past, there is also the existence of filmed archives from the period, home movies which completes the expression “mixture of genres” with its double resonance: sexual genre and cinematographic genre. And this, to approach a moving, worried and wonderfully invigorating truth, to which the director, after interviewing his mother, brings his share of light and shadow in front of his own camera.
“Your maternal animal”, by Valentina Maurel (Un certain regard)
The second feature film by Franco-Costa Rican filmmaker Valentina Maurel, discovered in 2022 with the beautiful Tengo sueños eléctricostells a story. That of Elsa, a young woman who returned from Europe to discover her younger sister living in a mess of more or less transgressive relationships and compulsive practices; while, each in his own corner, his immature father and his returning poet mother also follow chaotic and divergent trajectories.
But what matters is less the sequence of the narration than the presence, scene after scene, of bodies, places, atmospheres. In the twists and turns of the big city haunted by violent words and acts, in the convolutions of family score-settling, in the instability of what makes a life worth living, Valentina Maurel activates the resources of a cinema of bodies and atmospheres that intrigue and move, question without imposing judgment.
It is always beautiful, in a film, that characters initially perceived in a simplifying and rather negative way gradually gain legitimacy in the eyes of the spectators regarding their way of being. Thus there enter into circulation between them and them – the characters – and them and them – the spectators – low intensity currents, but sufficiently rich and complex to compose, ultimately, a sort of common world – however distant we may be a priori from those who appear on the screen.
“The Second Girl”, by Zou Jing (Critics Week)
Begun in a water of which we do not know whether it is nourishing, playful or at risk of drowning, the first film by the young Chinese filmmaker Zou Jing impresses for the calm fluidity with which it accompanies the nevertheless violent journey of its heroine.
From the age of 6 to her 20s, from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, she discovered that she was the child of three different families. The one who is successively called Juan-juan and Lian goes through episodes with very contrasting tones, filmed in a mode that is reminiscent of reverie and yet realism.
Behind the scenes are the gigantic changes experienced by China, the scale of conflicts between generations, between men and women, between social classes. But, and this is the beauty of the film, by never knowing more about all these big issues than what its protagonist can perceive.
The Second Daughterwhose French title emphasizes one of the many motives of the story (the effects, at the time, of the Chinese one-child policy) is called in Chinese (Wu ming nü hai) and in English (A Girl Unknown) “The Unknown Girl”, which is much more appropriate.
Unknown, she is especially so in her own eyes. It is the violence of this uncertainty that Zou Jing’s restrained staging embraces. Existing only in the eyes of others, who project onto her their emotional and social needs, conformities and frustrations, the heroine of the film follows a path in which each moment finds the right rhythm, to compose music that is much less wise than it seemed.
