The Cannes Film Festival, the largest film festival in the world, opened its doors on Tuesday night. The world of the 7th art is breathing again, after a canceled 2020 edition and the 2021 edition moved from May to July. We turn our spotlight on Africa’s ambassadors. And this year, the continent is better represented than usual.
With our special correspondent in Cannes, Sophie Torlotin
There are several Africans, young people, in difficulty or in search of liberation, who are represented in Cannes through six films.
Two can claim to win the prestigious Palme d’Or. In Haut et fort, the first Moroccan film selected in the competition, Nabil Ayouch portrays young people from a working-class neighborhood in Casablanca who discover rap and hip-hop culture. Lingui, les ties sacrés, by Chadian Mahamat Saleh Haroun, shows the plight of a fifteen-year-old girl in the face of an unwanted pregnancy and the ban on abortion.
At Critics’ Week we will discover The Gravedigger’s Wife, a realistic chronicle filmed in Djibouti. But also A story about love and lust, by Tunisian Leyla Bouzid about the complicated relationship between a Tunisian student and a young Frenchman of Algerian origin.
And then the movie Plume, by the Egyptian Omar el Zohairy, turned into a fantastic comedy about a tyrannical father of a … hen!
Finally, the festival’s UFO is without a doubt Fortnight. The French-American-Rwandan co-production Neptune Frost is called the musical love story between an intersexual African hacker and a rampant Coltan miner.
►Also read: Cannes Film Festival 2021: an opening without returning to “normal”
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