Cannes Film Festival: Politics at play amid the glitz

Paul R. Michaud, Contributor, Paris

Eighty special video surveillance cameras greet visitors at the Palais des Congres, the bunker-style compound set for the opening ceremony of this year's Cannes Film Festival in the south of France.

The tighter-than-usual security measures, which include the deployment of hundreds of armed guards, mostly in plainclothes, do not only mark the presence of Hollywood celebrities, including Sharon Stone, Michael Douglas and Woody Allen as well as Indonesian jury member actress Christine Hakim, who attended the gala inauguration on Wednesday, but also the festival's theme that has turned Cannes almost into a major political event.

First, the films included in this year's selection are more political than ever, said Thierry Fremaux, the festival's director. The choice has turned the Cannes festival, at least in this 55th edition, into the world's most political festival, certainly as polemical as Venice used to be in the past.

He defended the 22 selected films as somewhat somber and having little to do with the tinsel and glitter of Hollywood, but said they "reflect the state of the world as it is today, and you have to admit that not all is going well in the world these days, which is why it was inevitable that this year's festival would be more political, inevitably more pessimistic, than ever".

The Middle East is directly and indirectly the subject of a number of films shown among the official entries, including Kedma by Amos Gitai, Ten by Abbas Kiarostami and above all Divine Intervention by Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman -- one of those favored to receive a major award this year.

Then there is Roman Polanski, who for the first time in years returned to his homeland Poland to make The Pianist, a film about the holocaust.

The major reason behind the tight security is the recent political attacks made against France -- notably by officials of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- which accused France of becoming a hotbed of "anti-Semitism".

These charges that have made their way into some Hollywood trade publications as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, who had published full-page ads that exhort the U.S. film industry to boycott the Cannes Festival.

The campaign received further support in the U.S. from the American Jewish Congress, an organization that stood directly behind the boycotting ideas.

For the moment the call seems unheeded. Even festival participant Woody Allen has chosen to publicly criticize the campaign as "ridiculous".

But festival officials say they're wary that the verbal attacks, which they characterize as "unfair" and "unjustified", could very well take on more physical forms of violence.

That is why they've decided to prepare for what one festival officials referred to as "a worst possible case scenario," although he would not communicate neither the details of the scenario nor the security ramifications that are implied.

Meanwhile, Quai d'Orsay spokesman Bernard Valero remarked during Tuesday's press briefing that the accusations made against France "are not at all in conformity with the reality of France, especially as manifested in our recent presidential election".

President Jacques Chirac was reelected with 82 percent of the vote against the extremist National Front candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Moreover, the foreign ministry spokesman noted, "there does not exist in France an attitude or a movement that can be interpreted as being in any way anti-Semitic. True, there have been acts that are reprehensible at which France has condemned. Still, we consider these accusations as shocking, especially as they have no factual basis".

Asked, finally, whether the campaign has in anyway an objective to "influence" of France's Middle East policy -- a policy that has provided strong and consistent support to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat -- all Valero could reply is, "I don't know."

Some 1,400 films are expected to be sold during the 10-day event, which is considered the most important film marketplace in the world.