Art can be an excellent medium for\nlearning about other cultures. I find film to be the most engaging of all\ncommon art forms. It feeds on our most perceptive senses \u2013 sight and sound —\nbut also taps in to our capacity for empathy. A truly great film will\ntransplant the audience to its setting and connect them to its characters. Today,\nfilms from all over the world are easily accessible through streaming services\nand many of them allow us insight into foreign societies. While one cannot\nphysically interact with the setting or characters, a film in itself can be a humanised\nvestige of the socio-political ordeals happening within foreign societies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Cannes Film Festival, over the past few decades, has turned itself into a transnational event where films from Asian \u2013 and now African \u2013 nations are given the same attention as films from Western nations with more established film industries. The festivals highest accolade, called the Palme d\u2019Or<\/em>, was first awarded to an Asian country in 1954, when Japan\u2019s Teinosuke Kinugasa beat out films from France, The USSR, Brazil, Greece, India and the U.K. with his \u201cGate of Hell.\u201d Kinugasa\u2019s film also won an Oscar for \u2018Best Foreign Language Film.\u2019 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. \u00a0The 2015 Palme D\u2019or winner Dheepan<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2013 sight and sound — but also taps in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-ko","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1265,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions\/1265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}