Urgency and ambition in Cannes Acid 2025

On April 15 of this year, ACID, the youngest and small­est of the par­al­lel selec­tions at Cannes, announced its line­up, which includ­ed Sepi­deh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, a por­trait of the 25-year-old Pales­tin­ian pho­tog­ra­ph­er Fati­ma Has­souna and her work doc­u­ment­ing the ongo­ing atroc­i­ties in her native Gaza. The next day, Has­souna was killed, along with 10 mem­bers of her fam­i­ly, when an Israeli airstrike tar­get­ed her home. Both ACID and Cannes released state­ments in response to her death; the dif­fer­ence between the two is illu­mi­nat­ing. Cannes said that Has­souna and her fam­i­ly ​“were killed by a mis­sile that hit their home,” and num­bered among ​“the far too many vic­tims of the vio­lence that has engulfed the region.

The Pro­gramme Com­mit­tee of ACID 2025, mean­while, said that ​“an Israeli mis­sile had tar­get­ed her home, killing Fatem and sev­er­al mem­bers of her fam­i­ly,” mak­ing her ​“one more death added to the list of tar­get­ed jour­nal­ists and pho­to­jour­nal­ists in Gaza, and at the time of writ­ing, to the dai­ly litany of vic­tims who die under bombs, out of hunger, and because of pol­i­tics of geno­cide that must be stopped and for which the Israeli far-right gov­ern­ment must be held responsible.”

Cannes is, for bet­ter or worse, one of the defin­ing bod­ies of con­tem­po­rary insti­tu­tion­al film cul­ture, and let­ting indi­vid­ual film­mak­ers make polit­i­cal state­ments while assid­u­ous­ly pre­tend­ing not to know what they’re say­ing is about the best we can hope for from insti­tu­tion­al film cul­ture at the moment. ACID’s tick­ets are avail­able for book­ing through the Cannes web­site, but it is very much its own thing, even if, by pro­gram­ming Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, it made Fati­ma Has­souna the festival’s busi­ness, and moti­vat­ed Palme d’or jury pres­i­dent Juli­ette Binoche to devote a cou­ple min­utes of her remarks at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny to the mar­tyred journalist.

Found­ed in the ear­ly 1990s, ​“L’Association du ciné­ma indépen­dant pour sa dif­fu­sion,” the inde­pen­dent film asso­ci­a­tion for its dis­tri­b­u­tion, sup­ports inde­pen­dent film in France and inter­na­tion­al­ly through a num­ber of fes­ti­val and the­atri­cal exhi­bi­tion ini­tia­tives. Its selec­tion at Cannes every year is select­ed by a pro­gram­ming com­mit­tee of asso­ci­a­tion mem­bers, and its selec­tion, this year as every year, reflects the affir­ma­tive pri­or­i­ties of the film artists who make up the asso­ci­a­tion. This year, that seems to mean films whose pol­i­tics are embod­ied in their urgency and ambi­tion, as well as indie-uni­ver­sal­ist human­ism from film­mak­ers from dif­fer­ent backgrounds.

Anoth­er doc­u­men­tary, Syl­vain George’s Obscure Night – ​“Ain’t I a Child,” reg­is­ters among of the for­mer cat­e­go­ry. George embeds with migrant boys in Paris as they hang out all at night in large throngs late night below the Eif­fel Tow­er, sleep­ing rough, scav­eng­ing for coins and cig­a­rette butts, com­par­ing tra­jec­to­ries through Europe’s bureau­cra­cies and cus­to­di­al sys­tems, plans for papers and arrest his­to­ries. Two and three quar­ter hours long and the cul­mi­na­tion of a three-part series, the film uses dura­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in dis­tend­ed bull ses­sions and pea­cock­ing fights, sim­i­lar to the ear­li­er works of Pedro Cos­ta, and the frames are clas­si­cal as Costa’s are, too, but dif­fer­ent­ly so: the film is in mag­a­zine-glossy black and white, full of strik­ing angles on famous land­marks and unfa­mous, acne-scarred faces, both made equal­ly heroic. 

Like Lance Oppen­heim, George finds reveal­ing moments all the more strik­ing for being con­veyed in a con­spic­u­ous­ly cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage of con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing and strik­ing com­po­si­tions. Giv­en the film’s rap­port with youth explor­ing an urban envi­ron­ment, com­par­isons could also be made to author-sub­ject col­lab­o­ra­tive films like Bill and Turn­er Ross’ Tchoupi­toulas or Michal Marczak’s All These Sleep­less Nights, here achieved in the ser­vice of mov­ing lives from the mar­gins of Europe to the loom­ing foreground.