World cinema focus on socio-economic inequalities at Cannes film festival

On May 27, 2023

World cinema focus on socio-economic inequalities at Cannes film festival — File Photo

Cannes, May 27 (UNI) In the beginning of British director Ken Loach’s new film, ‘The Old Oak’, is a scene where a group of local people are protesting against the arrival of Syrian refugees in their small town near Durham, England. ‘The Old Oak’, which is competing for the prestigious Palme d’Or at the 76th Cannes film festival, is among many movies produced this year that focus on civil wars, refugee crisis and socio-economic inequalities across the world.

Loach, who has dealt with job losses during the 2008 economic meltdown in his 2012 film ‘The Angels’ Share’ and the plight of unemployed people living on state support in ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (2016), is a major contender for the top prize in Cannes, an honour he has won twice before.

Among the favourites for the Palme d’Or this year are Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s ‘La Chimera’, which explores the socio-economic inequalities in the Italian society, Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s ‘Fallen Leaves’ about the conditions of people engaged in manual labour in factories, and the American film ‘Black Flies’ by French director Jean-Stephane Sauvaire, a story of New York paramedics struggling to help the poor and jobless.

Winner of the Palme d’Or for ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ in 2006 and ‘I, Daniel Blake’ in 2016, Loach, who boasts of a long collaboration with his Kolkata-born scriptwriter Paul Laverty, probes the fissures in a society weakened by civil wars and poverty. “We are one of the richest countries in the world,” says a character in ‘The Old Oak’, lamenting the society’s failure to sustain the population under stress from lack of jobs and opportunities.

Rohrwacher, one of the six women directors in the Cannes competition this year, continues her exploration of the frightening gap between the rich and the poor in her new film, ‘La Chimera’, about a group of unemployed men and women digging old graves to find antiques they could sell for money. Winner of the Cannes festival’s Best Screenplay Award in 2018 for ‘Happy as Lazzaro’, the story of struggling farm workers in an Italian village, Rohrwacher continues her gaze on the inequalities in ‘La Chimera’.

‘Fallen Leaves’ by Kaurismäki is a frugal tale of factory workers in Finland hoping to find a better tomorrow in the midst of their sufferings. The celebrated filmmaker, who won the Grand Prix in Cannes for ‘The Man Without a Past’ in 2002, has emerged as a strong contender for the festival’s top award this year with his endearing portrayal of the quest for love and hope in a world that is prejudiced against the poor.

Among the six women directors in competition this year are Senegalese first-time director Ramata-Toulaye Sy (‘Banel & Adama’), Austrian Jessica Hausner, whose ‘Club Zero’ tells the story of a group of climate warrior-school students, Oscar-nominated Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (‘The Man Who Sold His Skin’), whose ‘Four Daughters’ is about a mother’s ordeal amid the disappearance of her two children, French director Catherine Breillat, whose ‘Last Summer’ tells the story of an affair between a woman and her husband’s teenaged son from a previous marriage, and French director Justine Triet, whose ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ is about a woman suspected of her husband’s murder.

The competition field also has Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose new film, ‘Monsters’, set in a small Japanese town focuses on two school students trying to remake a better world, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan with his Kurdish drama ‘About Dry Grasses’, Italian director Nanni Moretti (‘A Brighter Tomorrow’) and German Wim Wenders, who has shot his new film, ‘Perfect Days’, in Japan. Ceylan, Wenders, Kore-eda, Moretti and Loach are all previous winners of the Palme d’Or.