Cannes' Voyage to Neverland

By Yervand Kochar

During the 1963 Moscow International Film Festival, few had a doubt that Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” was not just a masterpiece but a milestone achievement that will signal a new epoch in filmmaking. The film was not merely contending for the Grand Prize; it was clear that no conventional prize can put a tag on the sheer artistic genius and refreshing power of the movie. Threatened by Fellini’s highly formalistic language, the Communist party’s movie department that was behind making the decisions of the festival, as usually, suspected something potentially harmful for the cause of the international proletariat. They began putting pressure on the head of the jury, Soviet filmmaker Grigori Chukhrai, not to award the Grand Prize to “8 ½ .”

Chukhrai was in a tight spot. He had his share of problems with the system with his 1959 war movie “The Ballad of a Soldier” where he did not depict the Nazis as stupid animals but rather as a highly organized and evil intelligence. Because of that, some in the government tried to ban Chukhrai and tried to label him as a Nazi sympathizer.

They failed; Chukhrai’s movies about the war were Soviet classics and Chukrai himself was a war hero who fought his way all the way to Berlin, involved virtually in every major battle of the war.

So when Chukhrai refused to back down the pack sensed an opportunity for a sweet revenge. Chukhrai claimed that depriving "8 ½" would not only be a blunt error of cinematic judgment but a political disaster for an A class festival. He claimed that when people see the movie in the West and learn that Moscow did not award it, the credibility of the festival would be ruined beyond repair. Chukhrai got into a power play with some very dangerous people who warned him that if Fellini gets the Grand Prize, Chukhrai will not be able to make another movie anytime soon, or ever…

Fellini’s ‘8 ½’ won the Moscow’s Grand Prize. It triumphed all over the world afterwards as a masterpiece acknowledged first at the Moscow International Film Festival. As a result, as promised, from now on Chukhrai had to fight for his every subsequent movie and was sabotaged and attacked for years to come.

It is easy to underestimate the magnitude of Chukrai’s sacrifice. Yet, it was tremendous. He bet his career, fame and ability to create his own movies for abstract ideals of truth and art. This was a character of the man who fought in World War , a man who saw and knew evil and never gave in to it. He was a real judge, a judge whose verdict meant something. His judgment of life and arts had repercussions for him most of all. His judgment was substantiated by his character. He was responsible for his judgment and he paid for it dearly.

However great “8 ½” was, Chukhrai’s action made it even more precious.


Now, what are the power and the value of Sean Penn’s judgment as the President of the Jury of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival?

This is a man who within two years met with three tyrants and validated—in an insignificant but well-promoted way—regimes and people who have blood and repression of artistic and human rights as their basic operational procedure. Appointing Sean Penn as a grand judge of the Cannes film festival was like appointing Bonnie and Clyde as the Secretary of the Treasury. Of all the politically active celebrities, Sean Penn was the only one who made the same idiotic move three times in a row. If his fellow tyrant-praising filmmakers, like Spielberg and Stone, had a crush on only one antiquated imbecile, namely Fidel Castro; Sean Penn felt that he needs to understand and shake hands with the whole trio — Castro, Ahmadenijad, and Chavez.

I mean, Leni Riefenstahl was undoubtedly a much more talented filmmaker than Penn, but even Neo-Nazis would agree that she was not fit to judge a major film festival after she kind of misjudged (or was forced to by history) the real character of that Austrian psychopath.


Ok, let’s put Sean’s politics aside; after all, celebrities (not artists) are usually aligning on the wrong side of the political tracks. This is natural, since they rotate in a self-imposed sphere of worldly power and because of the kinship they feel to each other’s contest to replace God.

Let’s leave the politics aside and examine the artistic merits by which Sean Penn was considered to lead the pack of jurors in an attempt to set the tone for the contemporary world cinema. Let’s assume that he is a fine actor, since I don’t think anyone in their sane mind would claim him as one of the greats. (I personally think that he brings a nervous, irritating energy onto the screen…kind of like his pal Ahmadenijad to politics). But again let’s assume that he is a fine actor. Ok, but there are many fine and even finer actors. So what separates Sean Penn from his colleagues; what is the criterion by which he is chosen to establish the trend?

He directed a movie, one may say. Oh, that’s right. Well, this surely separates him from the twelve remaining fine actors who haven’t yet tried to direct a movie based on an ‘edgy’ screenplay. I mean, c'mon, why didn’t they choose George Clooney as the president of the jury? He is another fine actor who directed a movie and also loves foreign dictators.


I really care about this festival. There were times when Cannes was praising masters. People who came here to tell the world something that the world didn’t know or didn’t know how to express. This was a great cultural event that inspired people and made them see something that affected their minds and souls.

Today Cannes just signals the decline of the cinema as an art form. It shows how bankrupt the movies have become. And this probably, better than anything, explains the choice of Sean Penn as the chief justice of the festival. He is the perfect representative of everything that went wrong with cinematic expression. The movies today communicate exactly what Sean Penn communicates through his life and on the screen: a confused and weak character moved by anger and immersed in despair; artistically dead and socially wired; too cowardly to fight, yet, anxious to be in peace; unable to discern good from evil, relative in truth and absolute in fallacy…and above all, impure in every single move.

It is this impurity that leads to the clinically bizarre fascination with tyrants and mass murderers like Che Guevara by weasels like Steven Soderbergh. I mean, think about this Cannes regular. To be able to make a movie about his private proletarian murderer hero, Soderbergh must once in a while make a movie about the pinnacle of American capitalism, a Las Vegas casino. Again, it’s like Bonnie and Clyde making a home security system infomercial video. Oh, I get it, Soderbergh is just a genius. He is robbing capitalist Americans by selling them his crappy Ocean movies in order to make real movies about communist heroes. Now I get it. But, wait, doesn’t it make him a bit of a traitor? Actually, a bigtime traitor?

Shame on me! Now I sound like Senator McCarthy.

Actually, yes, I am acting just like McCarthy. I am accusing a guy who made a move that lionizes a communist of being a communist sympathizer. That’s unfair to Soderbergh. I hope I don’t hurt his infantile hunger for an international revolution that proved to be a mass-murdering failure...let’s see, only about every time it was tried.

Wake up people! Antonioni was a master. Kurosawa was a master. These people today are just tricksters.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to say that because of their moral bankruptcy these people are not good artists. They have their talents, they have their moments, but they are not masters. They are not people who are supposed to set the bar. And setting the bar is precisely what festivals like Cannes do. They set the tone and they tell what goes and what does not.

Cannes is in part responsible for the visionary development of the human race. By entrusting the wheel to a filthy mouthed boatswain Tarantino and a Persian pirate’s parrot Sean Penn, Cannes gradually takes its ship to the ‘Neverland’ of becoming an irrelevant film event that ignores real masters: people like Chukhrai who preferred oblivion to a festival that increasingly becomes to the art of movies what Michael Jackson is to child development.