Judge Arundhati Roy only Indian entry at Cannes film festival

Roy is here as a member of the Grand Jury that will award the top prizes, including the Palme d’ Or to the best film. She follows a line of distinguished writers who have done jury duty in the past, including Tennesse Willaims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Francois Sagan and William Styron. In fact, she should be quite in her element here, since she wrote and acted in a wonderful tele-film for Doordarshan in 1980s, When Annie Gives It Those Ones.

The bad news this year is that Roy is the only Indian connection at Cannes, unless you count Ismail Merchant who will showcase his latest, and British produced, The Golden Bowl, later this week. The James Ivory-directed film is an adaptation of the Henry James novel. Every director dreams of this festival. Being part of Cannes can be the culmination of a career. M F Hussain was to rent a hall somewhere in town this year to give his ode to Madhuri Dixit, Gajgamini, a “screened at Cannes” label but, in all probability, he had difficulty raising the airfare since the film has yet to be sold in a single territory.

India is by far the largest film-producing country in the world but the sad fact remains that in the last one year, it has not produced one film worthy of the most prestigious and most lucrative festival in the world.

Cannes continues to be provocative. The selection committee has decided to exclude even Spain and Italy. As expected, there has been an uproar. Hollywood, for its part, has chosen to withhold some of its best films preferring to release them elsewhere on another date. Berlin and Venice festivals are more hospitable to its products. With hundreds of critics in attendance, a bad reception at Cannes can ring a death knell for a big budget film.

This year’s entries include Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou, starring George Clooney (who is currently being seen in India in The Three Kings), Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses and John Waters’ Cecil B. Demented staring Melanie Griffth.

Apart from India, Cannes has gone Asian in a big way this year. For the first time we have a film from South Korea, Chunhyang; Samira Makhmalbaf of Iran, at the remarkable age of twenty, will present her Blackboard, written by her father, director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Asia is also represented by In the Mood for Love (China), A One and a Two (China), Guizi La Le (China), Gohatto (Japan) and Eureka (Japan).

In the course of twelve days, hundreds of films will be shown in various categories, including Directors Fortnight, Un Certain Regard and The Critics Week. There will also be on display and for sale a large number of incredibly bad films from ever-hopeful producers and hustlers who have booked every hall in every nook and corner of this city.

The Cannes Film Market has opened for business in a newly-constructed $27 million complex. It accommodates 350 companies, six thousand people and comprises eight 70 seat, state-of-the-art cinema halls. The two weeks spent in Cannes is spent living and breathing movies. Being in Cannes is like being on the Noah’s Ark. Everyone is here! Hustlers for sure. But there are also those with a passion for cinema.

A footnote: National Film Development Corporation was very keen to send its team over to display its wares but the plan was nixed by the higher ups in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting with good reason. Last year they set up shop here at great expense but did not manage to sell a single film, not even to television!