With wars still raging in the Middle East and Ukraine — and turbulence escalating globally — artists on the film festival circuit have been navigating political minefields.
At the Berlin Film Festival in February, jury president Wim Wenders came under fire for saying that film directors should “stay out of politics” as he fielded questions from the press about Israel and Palestine. The backlash against Wenders’ statement was fierce; author Arundhati Roy, for one, pulled out of the festival in anger. Berlin’s artistic director, Tricia Tuttle, had to issue a formal statement regarding the media storm that threatened to engulf the festival.
In Cannes, thousands of film professionals, including stars Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo and director Ken Loach, signed a petition that blasted the increasing ideological influence of right-wing billionaire Vincent Bolloré, the majority shareholder of pay-TV powerhouse Canal+ and France’s biggest investor in movies. Audiences even booed the Canal+ and StudioCanal logos when they appeared in the credits of films the companies financed.
Then political discourse in Cannes veered into a raging debate over the use of AI in film. Juror Demi Moore urged the industry to find ways to both work with and protect itself from artificial intelligence. “AI is here,” she said, “and so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose.” Her statements created a firestorm on the internet.
