Last month, I attended the Cannes Film Festival to premiere THE RED SEA MAKES ME WANNA CRY, a short film for which I was a co-writer, as part of the Quinzaine des Cinéastes (Director’s Fortnight). It was an invigorating two weeks, sutured together by transformative films, and punctuated with fleeting sunshine and nourishing conversation about where filmmaking has come and where it's going. 

Although there were no explicitly nonfiction features in the Quinzaine, I was impressed by what I saw from the other programmed works on the fronts of autofiction, through approaches both mundane and mystical (Joanna Arnow’s THE FEELING THAT THE TIME FOR DOING SOMETHING HAS PASSED, and Pierre Creton’s UN PRINCE). There were also astounding works centering women’s lives, labors, and loves that all felt rooted in their respective places, contexts, and experiences, imbuing the narratives with a certain air of truth-telling that bolstered the central stories (Elena Martín’s CREATURA, Elene Naveriani’s BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD BLACKBERRY, João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis’s LÉGUA, and DocYard alum Rosine Mbakam’s MAMBAR PIERRETTE). As for nonfiction work, I was thrilled to see Miryam Tafakory's chillingly sensuous, kaleidoscopic short, MAST-DEL, which recounts a scene of violence in Iran from the tenuous safety of a lover's bed, and concludes with the sobering (inspiring?) postscript: the film was made with no funding.

Some Cannes documentaries to be on the lookout for: Kaouther Ben Hania’s FOUR DAUGHTERS, Steve McQueen’s OCCUPIED CITY, Asmae el Moudir’s KADIB ABAYAD (THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES), Wang Bing’s YOUTH (SPRING), and Sahra Mani’s BREAD AND ROSES.