Cannes Film Festival 2025 is all about looking at the present through the past

Hindustan Times

21-05-2025

The loudest cheer at the 78th Cannes Film Festival was reserved for a new black and white movie about the making of a movie some 65 years ago.
Nouvelle Vogue (New Wave) by American director Richard Linklater recreates the scenes of shooting legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's debut feature film, Breathless, in 1960. Cleverly mixing Godard's radical ideas of filmmaking with famous quotes on art from great minds like Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Gaugin, Nouvelle Vogue transports today's movie-goer to the middle of the last century, coinciding with an era of counterculture.
Transporting the audience to the past is a unifying theme this year among filmmakers around the world. Nearly half of the movies in the prestigious competition category at the Cannes festival are set in the last century, dating back to times following the First World War, with subtle and sometimes stark warnings of learning from history.
Consider these movies vying for the prestigious Palme d'Or in Cannes:
The great purge by Josef Stalin against dissent in the erstwhile Soviet Union in 1937 is the story of Belarusian-born Sergie Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors.
Sound of Falling by German director Mascha Schilinski, a frontrunner for the festival's top prize, is a dark story of servitude set in the years following the First World War.
Folk songs, war, and relationships mingle in The History of Sound, by South African-born Oliver Hermanus, which begins in America in 1917. American director Wes Anderson's The Phoneocian Scheme, the story of a business family in the United States, is set in the 1950s.
The Secret Agent by Brazilian Kleber Mendonça Filho is set in 1977 when Brazil was under the military regime. The backdrop of Fuori by Italian Mario Martone is Rome in the 1980s when three women forge a bond while serving time in prison.
An art heist in Massachusetts in 1970 during the Vietnam War is the subject of American Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind. Suburban Tokyo in 1987 is the setting for Japanese director Chie Hayakawa's new film, Renoir, which explores the troubled childhood of an 11-year-old witnessing the slow death of her father from cancer.
As stories of the last century appear on the screen many times this year, it becomes overly evident that the filmmakers are trying to address the conflicts in the contemporary world.
Explains Loznitsa, the director of Two Prosecutors, about his film relating the dark history of Stalin's terror to contemporary Russia. 'Unfortunately, these topics will remain relevant as long as there are totalitarian regimes in power anywhere in the world. None of the existing societies, no matter how advanced and democratic, are immune to authoritarianism and dictatorship. This is why I believe that the great purges of the 1930s still need to be studied and reflected upon.'
"Of course, we can say that history is repeating itself," adds Loznitsa, whose previous work, The Invasion, on the war in Ukraine was part of the official selection in Cannes last year. "Times change, circumstances change and technology develops, but the outcome is always tragic. The temptation to achieve one's political goals by the simple and 'effective' means of violence, can prove to be irresistible to the ruling elites of even the most democratic and seemingly incorruptible countries," he adds.
"Among several films related to past events in this year's Cannes selection, two different trends can be identified," says Jean-Michel Frodon, a former editor-in-chief of iconic French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, where French New Wave directors Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut were once critics.
"One is strictly inscribed in the past, for instance, the fake, but accurate, fictional making of Breathless by Richard Linklater. It is not pretending to relate with the present, except if seen as providing a contrast effect with now, where similar major breakthroughs in the art of cinema are hardly to be found," says Frodon.
"More significant are the films set in the past that actually address the present. Sergei Loznitsa makes it very clear that what is shown during the Stalinist terror in Two Prosecutors openly echoes the Putin regime today," says Frodon, a member of the Golden Peacock competition jury at the International Film Festival of India, Goa in 2009.
The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendoça Filho, mostly happens during the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1970s, but a few contemporary scenes with a young woman researching these events that happened half a century before testify that the movie is even more about today than about history.
The common theme of leaning to the past repeats itself in the festival's selection outside the competition category, too. Globally acclaimed Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz goes back to the time of the colonisation of Asia by European powers in his new film, Magellan, part of the Cannes Premiere section. The film gives artistic insights into Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan's conquest and conversion, leading to mutiny and violence, and ultimately his death in the Philippines in 1521.
Among other films exploring history are Turkish-origin German director Fatih Akin's Amrum set in the final months of the Second World War, Orwell: 2+2=5 by Haitian director Raoul Peck examining English novelist George Orwell's publication of his dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949 and the escape of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov's The Disappearance of Josef Mengele.
"The fictional films set in the previous years, decades, or even centuries are more to enlighten the present than to escape from it," says Frodon.
The Cannes Film Festival concludes on May 24.