Cannes Encounters:  Israelis, Iranians and Arabs at the World’s Largest Film Festival

“Fuck them,” is what Hossein Panahi, Ayat Media’s vice president, tells me when I ask him if he wants to sell films to Israel (For some reason, we ended up speaking in English.) He is manning the Istanbul-based, Iran-focused film production’s booth at Cannes Film Market, the world’s biggest event of its kind — just a few feet away from the Israeli stall. The most notable film Ayat is currently peddling is Damascus Time, the latest from Ebrahim Hatamikia, Iran’s official war director who caused controversy earlier this year by proudly declaring himself to be a “filmmaker for this regime” when receiving awards at the Tehran Film Festival. Damascus Time narrates the story of an Iranian father and son fighting the forces of ISIS in Syria and is partially funded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the mammoth militia that leads Tehran’s intervention in Syria. Founded in 2010, Ayat has taken part in Cannes and other leading film festivals including Berlin, Panahi tells me. It is one of a dozen Iranian booths at the Cannes market, most of which sell independent films, while the Farabi Cinema Foundation, an arm of the country’s culture ministry that presents Iranian cinema’s main offerings, is set up in a massive  pavilion at the festival. 

Panahi says they have sold their films to Japan, South Korea, Lebanon and Poland so far and adds that reactions to Damascus Time haven’t all been as negative as the Le Monde review that referred to the film as a propaganda piece with little artistic value. 

“Anybody who saw the movie sees that it is talking about ISIS and it’s not really about supporting Assad or the Iranian government,” Panahi says.

Men like Panahi represent an extreme of pro-government Iranians at Cannes. The Iranian hardliners might have once shunned events like Cannes as Western decadence best kept away, but they now know the value of getting their version of events across and make sure to foot the expensive bill of maintaining a presence here. 

Over at the official Farabi booth, people are anxious to speak to foreign-based media like IranWire — yet one filmmaker present openly boasts of closely following Israeli cinema and liking much of its work before naturally asking to remain anonymous. A man at the booth says sales have been slow but talking to worldwide distributors makes it clear that Iranian films are among the most sought-after. 

Israeli Film Buffs Love Iranian Cinema

Even as Iranian-Israeli tensions are at an all-time high, with the two countries having recently come dangerously close to a direct military conflict, Israelis continue to maintain a keen interest in Iranian cinema. The films of Asghar Farhadi, the double Oscar-winning director whose Spanish-language film Everybody Knows had the honor of opening the festival this year, are popular in Israel. In fact, it is something of an irony that Everybody Knows will almost definitely be screened in Israeli cinemas — but not in Iranian ones. Despite the express wishes of Farhadi that it be shown in Iran, the film shows enough flesh, song and dance to be beyond the pale of Iran’s strict censors. 

“Iranian films are very loved in Israel,” Marat Parkhomovsky, the director of Israel’s Utopia Film Festival, tells IranWire, as he hangs around the Israeli booth at the market. “It is one of the most respected cinemas in the eyes of Israeli film lovers. We feel that Iranian cinema has a deep cultural tradition. Its realism is very special, very deep and very different.” 

Avital Bekerman, the Israeli Film Fund’s head of development and a professor at Tel Aviv University, agrees. “Farhadi’s Separation was madly popular in some Israeli circles,” Bekerman tells IranWire. “We know Iran from cinema and it is so strange that this Iran is so different from the Iran we read about in newspapers. Compare the very polite language we hear in the movies and the images we see in the news. Directors like Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami are among our most favorite.” 

Like many Israeli artists I’ve talked to, Bekerman wishes there were more connections between the worlds of Israeli, Arab and Middle Eastern cinema. “When we talk about Israeli cinema, we always talk about its links to French or Italian but we don’t talk about our place in this region,” she says, before adding that she is “ashamed” of her country’s occupation of Palestinian territories that has made that contact so hard. 

People at the Israeli booth are somewhat amused by an Iranian visitor. A passerby tells me she is really worried about a war with Iran before saying: “We don’t hate you, we love you”. Another happily takes a picture with me, but is slightly disappointed when she learns I don’t live in Tehran, but in New York. I learn that veteran Israeli director Don Wolman has already marked his “greatest achievement” at the festival: Getting a tote bag from the Iranian pavilion that he can take home. 

Saudi Arabia: A Sleeping Giant in the Industry?

Earlier in the day, and a few kilometers to the east, Cannes’ legendary Hotel Carlton hosted an event that was the first of its kind. Although Iran and Israel both boast a sophisticated cinematic culture, the region’s most sizable country is still years behind — and now determined to catch up. In a glitzy room at the Carlton, Saudi Arabia loudly announced its first-ever presence in Cannes — or “first but definitely not the last,” as Ahmad Al-Maziad, the CEO of Riyadh’s General Culture Authority, put it. Al-Maziad was flanked by Faisal Baltyour, the CEO of the newly-launched Saudi Film Council, which plans to invest millions of dollars to support the as-of-yet mostly non-existent Saudi cinema. 

Until not long ago, Saudi Arabia remained perhaps the only country in the world that banned movie halls outright, a ban that seems to have been strictly enforced ever since the conservative turn the country took in 1979. The ban came to an official end in April, as the first Saudi cinema opened, part of a sea of change that the new crown prince, Mohammad Bin Salman, has ushered in the country (another ban he put an end to was that on women driving). The facts behind the cinema ban are unclear, although there is no doubt that in the past there have been underground film screenings, along with video rental stores. But this is on a different scale. For example, the US chain AMC Theaters plans to open up 40 cinemas in some 15 Saudi cities over the next five years. 

Al-Maziad and Baltyour are determined that Saudis have what it takes to build a cinema industry “on international standards” and that they can “leapfrog” other nations despite being latecomers to the game. They’ll have some catching up to do. 

When the movie Kef al-Hal was released in 2006, some had billed it as the first Saudi film, but cynics noted that it was shot in the United Arab Emirates. The 2012 film Wadjda had a better claim to the title as it boasted an all-Saudi cast, was entirely shot in the country and it was even submitted as the Saudi Arabian Entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars (definitely a Saudi first). That it was directed by an outspoken woman, Haifaa al-Mansour, and it premiered at Venice, one of the world’s big three festivals, further established the film. This was followed by the deadly funny comedy Barakah Meets Barakah, directed by Mahmoud Sabagh, and boasting the tantalizing screen duo Hisham Fageeh and Fatima Al Banawi, which was shot in Jeddah and premiered in Berlin in 2016.

But can a country that has only ever made a handful of feature-length films now show that it has been a “sleeping giant of the industry,” as Al-Maziad claims? Many reporters were skeptical, and asked some difficult (if not unexpected) questions at the Carlton press conference. 

Will women be allowed to be shown in the movies, and with what degree of veiling, was the first question, asked by a German reporter. An Indian journalist asked if Saudis will adopt an “Iranian model” of censorship. These and a slew of other questions were met with a standard response. The Saudis are preparing “content guidelines,” which will be out in a few weeks. “As any other society, we will have our own limits,” is how Baltyour put it to IranWire. 

I asked another Iran question during the press conference. Will the Saudis follow other regional bodies like the Doha Film Institute in funding Iranian films given the regional cold war that has sunk the Tehran-Riyadh relations to their lowest ever level? I noted that the Qataris had funded They, directed by Anahita Ghazvinizade, which was screened at Cannes last year, boasting an Iranian director and a transgender-themed story. It was an official Qatari co-production, showing that the kingdom doesn’t shy away from sensitive topics. I was met with the same standard response about the “content guidelines” not having been determined yet. 

Whatever these “content guidelines,” there is no doubt that the Saudis are diving head-on into the tempting world of cinema. Baltyour went out of his way to say that it is not “just the money” that the kingdom offers — although having quite a lot of that in the always cash-starved industry doesn’t hurt either. Not only has the Saudi state offered generous funds for movies shot in the country, the considerable private wealth is on the move too. London-based Saudi millionaire Hani Farsi is eyeing TV production through his Corniche Pictures. During Cannes, he optioned the rights for a book on Winston Churchill’s days as a war journalist and another on the advent of jet-set society. The MBC Group, whose satellite channels have long been familiar to viewers across the region, including in Iran, is also flexing muscle by dispatching its production arm O3 Productions as a potential partner, trying to entice projects to accept Saudi co-production and co-financing deals. 

In the first press conference of the festival, Asghar Farhadi said he hoped that his Spain-set film will show that cinema can cross borders and unite people across them. Whether cinema can do some of that for the beleaguered Middle East will be a true test of that wild-eyed optimism.