CANNES – Being a part of a film festival jury means you will never satisfy everyone. It’s part of the gig. For the jury of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, they were lucky enough to be handed a slate that featured few outright “bad” films and a bunch of worthy Palme d’Or contenders. The president of the jury, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, spoke to the press after the ceremony about the process the members went through to determine what turned out to be a unanimous selection of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” for the top prize.
READ MORE: “Parasite” takes Palme d’Or and Antonio Banderas wins Best Actor at Cannes
“The process was the same for every film,” Iñárritu says. “We saw 2-3 films a day. 21 films in the last 10 days. We saw it most times together with the audience, which is great. Not in a private room or things like that. From that experience normally we went to our room and our shared immediate reactions and impressions, but we never made a decision. We were not trying to get to a result immediately. We tried to always give the times to assimilate we felt to grow. And honestly, it was a beautiful process of sharing our impressions. IT was a beautiful share our notes what we were excited about. If we did not like it we didn’t spend our time explaining what we like or what we [don’t] like.”
As for “Parasite,” Iñárritu was effusive in his praise.
“This film is such a unique experience, an unexpected film,” Iñárritu. “I can explain it as an experience, we all shared the mystery of the unexpected way this film took us through different genres mixing and speaking in a funny, humorous, tender way of with no judgment of something so relevant and urgent and so global in such a local film with such a beautiful efficiency of media and understanding what is really film. I think we were all fascinated with the result and it kept growing and growing.”
He adds, “I think most of us have been on the other side. You are working with the rules of the game. This is the frame we have to work. You have to be very selective. Obviously, there were other films, but we [only] got seven awards.”
“Happy for Lazzaro” director Alice Rohrwacher clarified, “It’s not really a game. It was a democracy. We vote and there is a majority.”
“Cold War” director Paweł Pawlikowski generated some laughs in the room by quipping, “It was almost like North Korea.”
The jury’s selections were in some ways quite progressive. You can argue the Dardennes didn’t deserve another Cannes prize (they have taken the Palme twice), but their film “The Young Ahmed” deals with militant religious fanaticism. Shared Jury prize winners “Les Miserables” and “Bacurau” center on police brutality in France and class warfare in Brazil respectfully. “Pain and Glory” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” are fresh LGBTQ stories that demand to be seen. And Iñárritu saw a common thread in all of the winners.
“For us, it was very interesting how all these things are urgent. There is an urgency about it,” Iñárritu says. “Art is a reflection of the world and the world is reflected in art. And I think one weighs ahead. Fiction is normally the reality projected into the future and I think art can sometimes see a vision. There are visionaries and frequenting those issues and expressing those worries and those frustrations or nightmares or those things in an art form which is the language of cinema. I think now Cinema has an urgency of social consciousness around the world. That is very interesting to me.”
He then adds, “One thing I want to make clear that I established since the beginning before we started seeing films is that no other consideration but the film should be considered for the award. We will not care about who directed, what country, what political message. The honestly should not matter as the film itself. There was no agenda because that’s not what we wanted to convey. It was cinematic decisions, not political agendas.”
The Grand Prix winner, “Atlantique,” was not only the first film directed by a Black woman in competition but Mati Diop became the first woman of color filmmaker to win a competition prize at Cannes.
“That film touched us in our hearts until the very end. I loved how it was like a fable in a way,” Elle Fanning says. “A beautiful and that really stood out. Even though it deals with these issues it also felt quite personal and vulnerable. And quite precious. We loved watching it.”
Fanning has been acting since she was three-years-old. She practically grew up on movie sets, but there was still some surprise when the 21-year-old was selected as the youngest juror in the history of the festival.
“I do feel I didn’t know how I would come out of this experience and I do feel like I see films in a different way,” Fanning says. “I learned so much and having to watch these 21 films in a short amount of time you can’t help notice things you haven’t noticed before and also to get to talk to these filmmakers right after. And sometimes we can’t talk about it, we need to marinate in it. I will never forget these 10 days. I don’t want it to be over. I do view cinema different for the good.”
Before the conference ended, Iñárritu stopped to make a point about Fanning’s important contributions.
“I have to say having Elle in the jury was a gift in a way Her opinion and having a Millenial in the jury surrounded by old people attached to different ideas, suddenly we had her freshness and her honesty and Elle is an old soul,” Iñárritu. “She’s been doing films forever, but on the other side. To have the fresh ideas and it really grounded us a lot in a very beautiful way because we see it different and through her young eyes when we are sometimes attaching ideological things and it was really beautiful to have. We learned a lot from her.”
Of course, by most accounts, Fanning isn’t actually a millennial and the 37-year-old Rohrwacher (we’re not saying she cringed when he referred to everyone else on the dais as old, but we’re not saying she didn’t either), but his point was solid. Perhaps we’ll see more young jury members in the years ahead.
