The most harrowing drama this year hands down has taken place offscreen and found some festivalgoers booing the logo for the French film financing behemoth Canal Plus whenever it’s popped up in credits. Before the festival opened, some 600 French movie professionals, including some with films here, signed a petition condemning the influence of the media mogul Vincent Bolloré, who controls Canal Plus and whose news outlets have promoted the far right. The letter warned that his influence would lead to “a fascist takeover of the collective imagination.” On Sunday, the head of Canal Plus, Maxime Saada, said at an event that the company would no longer work with the signatories.
The threat of a boycott in the arts is gravely unsettling; it also could be calamitous given how many movies rely on French financing, including from other countries. “Congo Boy,” Rafiki Fariala’s touching, intimately scaled drama, focuses on a sweet, unsinkable teenage refugee in the Central African Republic who finds his voice while struggling to support his siblings. It has French backing and so does “Ben’imana,” from the Rwandan writer-director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo. Set 18 years after the genocide in her country, it revisits the horrors of the past through the lives of survivors whose trauma is inscribed in their haunted faces, broken bodies and crushing memories. Both movies are in Un Certain Regard, a festival section largely for young and first-time filmmakers.
The French model of financing movies is complex and has been routinely criticized, including by the Trump administration. When Justine Triet won the Palme for “Anatomy of a Fall” in 2023, she took aim in her acceptance speech at the French government for some of its economic policies while also extolling the country’s “cultural exception,” a policy that protects cinema with subsidies, robust theatrical releases and other measures. As Triet explained that evening, “Anatomy of a Fall” had profited from this policy, with some of its budget coming from the state. The cultural exception benefited her and moviegoers, including those in the United States, where the film became yet another Cannes winner to significantly factor in the Academy Awards.
Triet and her partner, Arthur Hariri, ended up winning the Oscar for best original screenplay for “Anatomy of a Fall.” Hariri signed the Canal Plus letter; he’s also a director, and his latest, “The Unknown,” a darkly moody body-swapping fantasy, is in the main competition. It focuses on several characters who mysteriously find that their consciousnesses and maybe their souls have taken up residence in other bodies. It’s an absorbing, irritating, at times touching movie, and while I’m not wholly convinced by it — or how it skitters around identity, trans included — I’m glad to have seen it at Cannes, where an exceptional attitude toward cinema reigns supreme.
