Art can be an excellent medium for learning about other cultures. I find film to be the most engaging of all common art forms. It feeds on our most perceptive senses – sight and sound — but also taps in to our capacity for empathy. A truly great film will transplant the audience to its setting and connect them to its characters. Today, films from all over the world are easily accessible through streaming services and many of them allow us insight into foreign societies. While one cannot physically interact with the setting or characters, a film in itself can be a humanised vestige of the socio-political ordeals happening within foreign societies.
The Cannes Film Festival, over the past few decades, has turned itself into a transnational event where films from Asian – and now African – nations are given the same attention as films from Western nations with more established film industries. The festivals highest accolade, called the Palme d’Or, was first awarded to an Asian country in 1954, when Japan’s Teinosuke Kinugasa beat out films from France, The USSR, Brazil, Greece, India and the U.K. with his “Gate of Hell.” Kinugasa’s film also won an Oscar for ‘Best Foreign Language Film.’ At a time when the world was still fresh with the wounds from Second World War II, the Cannes Festival used film to bridge the gaps between former enemies who had suffered horribly at the hands of one other. With this in mind, one must imagine that platforms for Japanese culture to express itself on a global stage would have been exceptionally limited and likely met with reservations if not outright negativity. The Cannes festival has maintained its transnationalism and each year, the festival continues to collect nominations from the far corners of the globe. Recently, the festival has been making a point of being globally inclusive. The main competition included films from Iran, Kazakhstan, China, Japan, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt. Film is an industry that been historically dominated by a limited number of countries, namely the U.S., U.K. and France. While the most profitable movies are still almost invariably Hollywood productions, the Cannes Festival gives platforms to films and directors who would otherwise be overlooked by moviegoers. The films selected by the juries are most often small budget films with intensely humanist plotlines rather than widely released blockbusters. The 2015 Palme D’or winner Dheepan traces the excruciating ordeal of a former Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger as he finds political asylum in the crime-ridden suburbs of Paris. These kinds of storylines illustrate both the international and human focus of the festival. Art is an exceptional vehicle for transnationalism and the Cannes Film Festival epitomises the power of film to transcend cultural, political and national barriers.