To guess what will be next in international cinema, one often has to look no further than football. Follow the (global) money: whenever financial fluxes become big enough in the football world, there are strong chances that similar fluxes will be subsequently visible in cinema too.

Only a while after Qatar’s huge investment in that sport, Saudi Arabia followed. For several years now, the Doha Film Institute has been one of the key players in global cinema, but Saudi Arabia is bound to make its presence increasingly felt in the years to come.

So declared Thierry Fremaux, the big boss of the Cannes Film Festival, during which the Kingdom has announced the creation of two separate film sector funds worth a total of 180 million dollars.

Some films they’re already funding, such as Four Daughters by Kaouther Ben Hania. A convincingly arty docu-fiction on the family of Tunisian Olfa Hammouni (minus the husband, gone), it features the real-life Olfa and two (out of four) of her real-life daughters, constantly addressing the camera, and playfully interacting with the actresses impersonating them.

The Cannes Film Festival is making a serious effort to be attuned to a Zeitgeist bent on gender equality issues but the real tussle seems to be between non-Western cinema and Western cinema intent on imposing its world view on it

After giving Western audiences the stereotyped exoticism they supposedly look for (that is, something of the “confessions of Islamic women without veils” kind), tables turn completely: Olfa admits that her two other girls are missing because they’re still in jail after joining the Islamic State (IS) in Libya.

Just as the Tunisian revolution (a historical turn which Olfa recognises as inseparable from her own existential parable) paved the way for a massive wave of radicalisation in the country, Olfa’s effort for self-emancipation from an oppressive husband led to the traumatic estrangement of her two daughters.

Thus, a film which at first seemed so impregnated with the now-fashionable Western ideology, according to which only self-representation is legitimate representation, shows IS’s anti-representation obscurantism as that ideology’s flipside through and through. Two sides of the same coin: the West cannot call itself simply out of it.

Controversial stuff, to be sure. But business is business. What is more: new business is new business, and old business is old business. Take Banel and Adama by debuting French-Senegalese Ramata Toulaye-Sy, produced by more than a dozen ultra-institutional Franco-français partners: a discomfortingly banal, amateurishly illustrated, clichéd tale of (supposed?) female emancipation, lazily rebooting French industry’s decade-old scheme of interested, patronising intervention in African cinemas by imposing a crypto-Eurocentric vision on them.

If there ever is something like propaganda in today’s world cinema, and a neo-colonial one at that, Banel and Adama comes across as an example of it unquestionably more than Four Daughters.

It is not that African gems were missing. The highlights of Un Certain Regard sidebar — along with the quietly-paced divertissement of a recognisably, exquisitely South American literary kind, Los Delincuentes (by Rodrigo Moreno), and the pleasantly démodé existential crime fiction Only the River Flows (by Wei Shujun) — were Goodbye Julia by Mohamed Kordofani and Augure by Baloji.

The former is an astonishingly mature, solidly written, politically wise look at the lacerations of war-torn Sudan, shot with effective, spot-on dryness from the point of view of a Muslim middle class family welcoming with ambiguous purposes within their household a Christian Southern woman.

Augure plunges into new versions of old postcolonial predicaments: a Congolese family rejecting the protagonist’s Belgian girlfriend; intra-African migration (who cares about Europe after the 2008 crisis?) and its discontents; the ambivalent role of traditional medical practices; local folklore and the ruthless mafias thriving behind it.

Somewhat healthily, Baloji cares more about pinpointing contradictions than solving them, and exacerbates them with an abrasive, over-the-top visual style. A mention should also be made to The Mother of All Lies, by Moroccan Asmae El Moudir, a documentary ingeniously bending the conventions of how family history (El Moudir’s) and national history may intersect.

Back to the main competition. Ben Hania and Toulaye-Sy were two of the seven women directors competing for the Palme (33 percent of the whole lot). Indeed, the Festival is making a serious effort to be attuned to a Zeitgeist bent on gender equality issues, and on changing the roles of women in a number of societies.

Thereof, the French diptych Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet and Last Summer by Catherine Breillat spoke volumes. A young promise and a well-respected veteran directing. Two female protagonists.

On the one side a gripping, unsentimental courtroom drama trying to be the arthouse European version of American quality TV series (and therefore predictably awarded the Palme d’Or), on a successful writer falsely accused of the murder of her partner, but possibly not completely unimplicated in his decision to kill himself.

On the other side an intense, old-school, brutally frank character-study of a lawyer cheating with her stepson, blatantly lying about it, and lashing out against her husband for accusing her. In short, the Anglo-Saxon way of looking at these things versus the European way.

Gender equality intended as the restoration of justice for the victims and/or the innocents, versus gender equality intended as allowing the same weapons to each party in the never-ending warfare called “marriage”, where no one is ever innocent.

Indeed, there was no shortage of controversial topics in the main competition — Holocaust included. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (Jury Grand Prize), loosely adapted from a novel by Martin Amis (who died the day after the premiere), shows the wealthy house of a German commandant placed right next to the Auschwitz camps.

Family bliss and the quintessence of horror side by side, peeped through a strange, sharply digital directorial approach, mixing CCTV-cameras-like unobtrusiveness and outstanding, gardener-like care for every single inch of the reconstructed settings.

Besides the shocking juxtaposition of heaven and hell, through the relationship between the commandant and his wife, temporarily troubled by unmistakably contemporary concerns, such as flexibility in the workplace, Glazer instils an even more uncanny doubt: what if Nazism is simply the seed of our present-day corporate world, replacing the customary dialectic between public and private dimensions with a never-ending sacrifice of the private for the very sake of the private?

Corporate politics, allegorised through the thin veil of 16th century feudal Japan with tongue-in-cheek nihilism and liberatingly crass humour, is also at the centre of Takeshi Kitano’s Kubi. Its section (Cannes Premiere, non-competitive) mostly included films which would have easily been welcomed in the main competition if the latter still had any of the genuine penchant toward cinematic innovation it used to have until a couple of decades ago.

Its peak, Close Your Eyes by Victor Erice, is simply one of the best films in a very long time: an impeccable essay on human sight, memory, subjectivity, and especially on how cinema, by pushing all three of them to their limits, can still teach us the Art of Living.

Its exclusion from the main competition is all the more puzzling, given the abundance of auteurs (Ken Loach, Wes Anderson, Nanni Moretti, Jessica Hausner, Wim Wenders, Todd Haynes…) merely reshuffling the styles and themes they’re known for, with no surprises.

There were some exceptions though. Hirokazu Kore-Eda (Monster, Best Screenplay Award) came up with a miraculously fresh and touching way of contrasting the narrowness of the grown-ups’ perspective with the grace of childhood.

Marco Bellocchio signed a dreamlike, schizophrenic, flamboyant, intriguingly intricate melodrama (Kidnapped) on the never-ending conflict (and interpenetration) between Church and State, family law and community law, through the eyes of Edgardo Mortara, a 19th century Jewish child literally kidnapped by the Vatican (a story which Steven Spielberg too, a few years ago, wanted to film).

Tran Anh Hung’s modest yet exceptionally well-made ode to the craft of cooking, to the craft of filmmaking, and to the very particular, very discreet and humble kind of love underlying both (The Pot-Au-Feu, Best Director Award) was another one.

Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves (Jury Prize), an elegantly stylised, delicately abstract, Chaplinesque love story is set in the days of turbocapitalism. If the economy makes life impossible, one can only fight back by dreaming big, learning from cinematic melodrama (e.g. Douglas Sirk, Kaurismaki’s obvious source of inspiration) how desire can take shape through images, against all odds.

This is not to say, however, that realism is not alive and well. After meticulously, faultlessly reconstructing the entanglement of economic and sexual micro-politics characterising the life of the lower-middle classes of the eponymous UP city (and by extension in the Subcontinent more broadly) through the eyes of a 25-year-old incel obsessed by an imaginary girlfriend, Agra slowly but surely builds a hope for its hopeless protagonist.

Through a well-devised system of shifts in tone and acting imperceptibly perturbing the grimness of the story without ever losing sight of plausibility, love seeps through the drabness of a relentlessly petty social microcosm, and changes the life of the young man.

The best in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes section, Kanu Behl’s film delivered where Anurag Kashyap (Kennedy, out of competition) and Canadian-Pakistani Zarrar Kahn (In Flames, also at Quinzaine) did not.

Both tackled social issues (the artificial creation of states of emergency whereby the powers-that-be can consolidate their rule; women’s systemic oppression in Karachi and Pakistan at large) by integrating them with genre frameworks (crime; horror), but the mixture unfortunately did not add up in either case.

Published in Dawn, ICON, June 4th, 2023