Nine days into the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, Jean-Luc Godard and a band of New Wave insurgents brought the Croisette to a halt, shuttering the world’s most glamorous movie showcase in solidarity with student protests sweeping France. Nearly six decades on, the question hanging over this year’s edition is whether geopolitics — from Gaza to Iran — could again hijack the narrative, or whether Cannes will once more prove it can absorb the shock without losing control.
This year’s Berlin Film Festival provides a cautionary tale. Fierce debate over the war in Gaza ignited a political firestorm that nearly cost festival director Tricia Tuttle her job. Jury president Wim Wenders’ insistence that “we have to stay out of politics” was swiftly overtaken by filmmakers who refused to do any such thing. Onstage statements on Gaza — Syrian-Palestinian director Abdallah Al-Khatib, winner of the Berlinale Perspectives section for his drama Chronicles of a Siege, called out the German government as being “partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel” — triggered an institutional backlash. It all played out in public, generating far more headlines than any of the films in competition.