Italian minister to boycott Cannes over Silvio pisstake

The 63rd Cannes film festival opens on Wednesday and it's shaping up to be one of the most controversial in years with the organisers fearful of several clouds on the horizon - literally and metaphorically.
 
The pressing concern for the world's most glittering movie jamboree is the Icelandic volcano whose eruptions continue unabated. A dense cloud of volcanic ash has been drifting down through Europe for several days, causing severe disruptions to air travel.

Nice airport cancelled around 20 flights at the weekend and much of Italy's airspace was closed on Sunday. Cannes’ deputy mayor, David Lisnard, is trying to put a brave face on the situation, joking: “It seems that everybody wants an invitation to Cannes, even the cloud.”

But the organisers will be desperate that the volcanic ash doesn’t disrupt the travel plans of films stars such as Sean Penn, Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett, all of whom are scheduled to tread the red carpet during the 12 days of festivities.

And the stars themselves, dressed in their dickie bows and designer frocks, will be praying there’s not another storm like the one that battered Cannes last Tuesday. Older residents of the Cote d’Azur town described it as the most violent tempest to hit Cannes in 50 years, with six-metre waves lashing the Croisette [the beachfront thoroughfare], overturning cars and smashing windows.

An army of workers continues to clean up the damage – estimated by Lisnard to run into millions of euros – but with the wind still up and the temperature down, those stars who do beat the ash cloud might not want to linger on the red carpet.

One man who definitely won’t be coming to Cannes, whatever the weather, is Italy’s Minister of Culture, Sandro Bondi. He’s boycotting the festival in protest at the screening of Draquila: Italy Trembles, a documentary examining the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated the town of L’Aquila in April last year, killing 300 people.

The film’s maker, comedian Sabina Guzzanti (pictured as Berlusconi, above), is strongly critical of the way in which the Silvio Berlusconi government has failed to fulfil its promise to rebuild L’Aquila. More than 50,000 people are still without a home, many forced to live in army barracks, and there is allegedly widespread corruption between officials and building contractors.

But Culture Minister Bondi has called Draquila "propaganda... which insults the truth and the Italian people" and he is said to be particularly outraged by one scene in which Guzzanti impersonates Berlusconi.

Guzzanti, for her part, admits that while Draquila is simply a film that attempts to show the effects of the earthquake, it is also “a reflection on Italy's drift to authoritarianism”.

Bondi’s decision to boycott Cannes has been derided by Daniele Luchetti, the Italian director whose film La Nostra Vita will be screened at Cannes. "I don't really know what to say about a minister who is ashamed of artistic freedom," said Luchetti. "A free country should show this kind of work. One must be proud to bring such a demonstration of freedom abroad."

But Draquila isn’t the only film courting controversy in Cannes. The French-Algerian director Rachid Buchareb has upset members of France’s ruling UMP party with his movie Hors-la-loi [Outside the law], which premieres during the festival. The film depicts the Setif massacre in Algeria in May 1945, a brutal confrontation between French troops and Algerians protestors demanding independence.

French politician Lionel Luca has labelled the film ‘anti-French’ and accused it of falsifying history in portraying France as the aggressors. "The first massacre of that day was perpetrated by an armed crowd [of Algerians] who lynched some Europeans," he said recently.

French Far-Right groups are threatening a "crusade on the Croisette" if the film's screening goes ahead but the festival’s director-general, Thierry Fremau, said he won’t be intimidated by such calls. He has the support of some of France’s most respected intellectuals, 10 of whom wrote to Le Monde saying that the antipathy to the film in some quarters was "a symptom of the return of colonial awareness in certain nostalgic areas of the French community, with the complicity of governors... when the political power wants to write the history our citizens will see on the screen tomorrow, we must fear the worst".

Fortunately the historical film that opens the festival – Ridley Scott's Robin Hood - shouldn’t offend too many people, even if the sight of Russell Crowe in green tights proves a little too much for some. ·