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Kusturica sets Cannes agenda
The jury ?would concentrate on the aesthetics of filmmaking? while judging the features in competition at Cannes 2005, writes Saibal Chatterjee.
The red carpet acquired a brighter hue in the fading sun and the camera flashlights went into overdrive as the 58th Cannes Film Festival was flagged off here on Wednesday evening. Mistress of ceremony Cecile de France, helped by jury president Emir Kusturica, did the honours before the opening film, French director Dominik Moll’s Lemming, unspooled on the screen of the Theatre Grand Lumiere.
India was represented at the opening of the world’s premier film festival by jury member Nandita Das, in a sparkling red sari picked up “from her own wardrobe”, and the ubiquitous Aishwarya Rai, who walked up the red carpet with French model Laetitia Casta, even throwing her arm around the latter’s waist a shutterbugs clicked away.
Also present was veteran actress Sharmila Tagore, in Cannes for a special screening of a restored print of Pather Panchali in the Cannes Classics section.
While the opening film left some a trifle cold, the 50-year-old Serb filmmaker Kusturica told the international press hours earlier that his jury “would concentrate on the aesthetics of filmmaking” while judging the 20 features that are in competition. “By that I do not merely mean the beauty of filmmaking. Aesthetics for me also means morality and ethics,” he explained.
Kusturica elaborated: “We are not going to achieve a democratic process. Democracy can lead to pathetic decisions. Our decisions will spring from the heart while being tempered with rationality.”
He defended the decision of last year’s Cannes jury, presided over by Quentin Tarantino, to bestow the Palme d’Or on Michael Moore’s anti-Bush documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. “The choice was perfect because the film was against a person who is an enemy of aesthetics,” Kusturica quipped.
Kusturica, two-time Palme d’Or winner, heads a nine-member jury that includes a Nobel laureate, US writer Toni Morrison, who got the longest and loudest applause at the press conference organized to introduce the jury to the media.
The other members of the jury are filmmakers Agnes Varda, Benoit Jacquot, John Woo and Fatih Akin and actors Salma Hayek and Javier Bardem.|
For Morrison, sitting on the Cannes jury is a new experience all right but she promised, half in jest, to bring “the infallibility of my judgment and my enthusiasm” to the job. She reminded the gathering that she is “an avid film watcher although she usually avoids commercial screenings.”
The focus of most questioners was understandably on Salma Hayek and Javier Bardem. Hayek confessed that being on the jury is a learning experience and therefore far more exciting than coming to the festival merely as an actress. “When you bring a film here, the learning process is already over. As a jury member, I will keep learning till the very end of the exercise,” she said.
