16/05/2007

At this afternoon’s opening press conference, the official competition jury of the 60th Cannes Film Festival took its first steps under the direction of its president, British director Stephen Frears, who answered most of the questions.

However, media attention was also focused on Chinese actress Maggie Cheung (Best Actress at Cannes 2004) and Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk (2006 Nobel Prize for Literature), who to some extent stole the limelight from the six other members of the jury: Australian actress Toni Collette, French-Portuguese actress Maria De Medeiros, Canadian actor-director Sarah Polley, Italian director Marco Bellocchio, Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako and French actor-director Michel Piccoli.
Selected quotes:

Stephen Frears: The members of this jury are very intelligent people and I have no intention of imposing anything on them. Although I’m as intelligent as them, I won’t say a thing. I grew up when cinema was innocent, before it became so self-conscious, so my prime memories are of just going to films because they were enjoyable. The directors were invisible. Now, we spend our life in a world dominated by American films. In Europe and elsewhere, we continue to resist, even if I also like American cinema. Thank goodness there’s a demand for a certain kind of film, in other words, that there is an alternative to just the films that the American studios make. Many places celebrate that, and Cannes is at the top of that. The most important thing is that there is a lot of variety and many films.

Orhan Pamuk: We are not here to judge the director's previous work. It’s just about going to movies with a child’s enthusiasm. That’s why it’s so much fun. We are not professors, we are just film-goers.

Abderrahmane Sissako: What’s important is the feeling of sharing different visions and being able to change opinion.

Maggie Cheung: I don’t have any favourite film style. They are either good or bad. Although I like all genres, I am particularly sensitive to more artistic than calculated styles. Of course, I’m a fan of Wong Kar Wai, but also of Van Sant, Tarantino…, and here, we are not a fan club. Apart from friendships, it is the films that matter. I think acting is the hardest thing to judge in a film. Sometimes the actor can be great all by himself, or it can be a great director directing an actor who doesn’t know how to act. So it’s hard to say who the credit should go to when you see good performances, but then I think you can always tell an actor when they are true to their part or just pretending.

Michel Piccoli: In general, films help us to understand what is happening in the world and sometimes show the secret side of some countries. For 100 years, cinema has been very energetic all over the world. Of course, there is big rivalry, and not only in cinema, between the United States and the rest of the world. But at Cannes and in France, we can see films from all over the world while in the US almost the opposite is true. So, let’s continue the fight.

(Translated from French)