A knee injury may have kept Barbra Streisand away from Cannes this year, but it wasn’t enough to stop her sending a special video message for the festival’s closing ceremony, where she was honored in absentia with the Palme d’Or.
Following an introduction by Isabelle Huppert and a video reel including clips from “The Way we Were,” “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” “Nuts,” “A Star is Born,” “Up the Sandbox” and “Funny Girl,” the icon of music and film appeared on the big screen in the Palais to a delighted crowd.
In a lengthy message, Streisand revealed how she had fallen in love with foreign films thanks to a cinema near her high school that had shown movies from the likes of Fellini and Kurosawa. “I was mesmerized by those images on the screen,” she said. “I wanted to be an actress and live in those more interesting worlds.”
Years later as an actress, she said she realised she was always “looking at the movie as a whole” and “asking a lot of questions.” As she notes: “I didn’t realise at the time, but I was thinking like a director. And I had stories I wanted to tell.”
Among those stories was 1981’s “Yentl,” her directorial debut, for which Streisand became the first woman to win the Golden Globe for best director. But it was a film she said was very difficult to get off the ground.
