The history of the Cannes Film Festival is underscored by a sense of rebellion. After all, its creation in 1939 was in response to Mussolini’s undue influence over the Venice Film Festival. Whether or not Cannes retains this righteous stature today is a matter of debate. A glance at this year’s lineup might yield an affirmative response, especially since the festival’s coveted trophy—the Palme d’Or, or the Golden Palm—was awarded to Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi for the fierce comedy-drama It Was Just an Accident, his first movie since being released from prison. However, a curious controversy surrounded a more brash and explicit work: Nadav Lapid’s vicious satire Yes!, which the Israeli director believes was bumped from the festival’s main competition (in favor of a slot in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar) for its critique of Israel’s war on Gaza. “[The film] became—unwittingly—a kind of tool which measures cowardice and courage,” Lapid told IndieWire, opening a wider conversation on whether the movie will find distribution both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Cannes has long been a Hollywood-friendly event—especially under the auspices of Thierry Frémaux, its director for over 20 years—and has more recently become a major platform for mainstream cinema, with six of the last seven Palme d’Or winners going on to have a presence at the Academy Awards. Two of them, Bong Joon-ho’s class thriller Parasite and Sean Baker’s neorealist fairytale Anora, even closed out the broadcast with Best Picture Oscars in hand. Cannes arguably wields more institutional power than it ever has, leaving in a precarious place the question of how much room it can truly create for cinema that speaks truth to power.
Just last year, the Palestinian anthology film From Ground Zero—which was shot by twenty-two filmmakers under military siege, and which would go on to become Palestine’s submission to the Oscars’ Best International Feature category—was accepted by Cannes but was subsequently pulled “on political grounds,” leading to a private guerrilla premiere as an act of protest. This year’s program, however, saw multiple Palestinian selections, which might be seen as mea culpas. The 2007-set crime drama Once Upon a Time in Gaza played in the festival’s prestigious Un Certain Regard competition (where it won the Best Director Award) while the documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, about young Gaza photojournalist Fatma Hassona, was announced as part of the L’ACID sidebar in April. Hassona was tragically killed in an Israeli airstrike the very next day, prompting a tribute from the festival shortly thereafter.
However, where Once Upon a Time in Gaza and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk condemn annexations and bombardments—active instances of military incursion—Lapid’s satire hits much closer to home, unearthing the root causes of these violent symptoms by taking aim at broader swathes of societal malaise. Holding such a blatant and contemporary mirror to complicity is bound to rustle some feathers. Lapid is an Israeli filmmaker living in Paris and has made several movies in which Israeli characters struggle with their indoctrination into fervent nationalism. However, Yes! is perhaps his most brazen indictment of militarism to date. It focuses on comedian and adult entertainer Y (Ariel Bronz) who, in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack, is conscripted to compose music for a new national anthem for his country, whose lyrics are steeped in bloodthirst and vengeance.
The film, though it meanders on occasion, conjures an unkempt fury en route to a devastating final act. Its camera shakes and shivers even during farcical moments of song and dance, as though bursting with an anger that can seldom be contained or expressed in words—but this doesn’t stop Lapid’s voiceover from directly stating his themes. As his characters go about their mundane, sheltered lives in Tel Aviv, iPhone news alerts denote the latest death tolls in Gaza. These notifications are accompanied not just by beeps and chimes, but by agonizing, disembodied screams, as Yes! begins to bear resemblance to another Cannes and Oscar darling from two years ago: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a period drama in which a Nazi officer’s family ignores the sounds of atrocities behind the wall of an adjacent Jewish extermination camp.
This comparison doesn’t feel accidental. Lapid’s farcical, Starship Troopers-esque satire soon becomes imbued with tremendous emotional weight, and the movie’s voiceover laments how a society might become as genocidal as the very persecutors it once fled. One can only guess, but such an incendiary comparison might have been at the root of Yes! being pushed into a section with far less media attention. Many had previously speculated that Yes! would be a shoo-in for the main competition (like his previous movie Ahed’s Knee, which deconstructs militaristic notions of Israeli masculinity). However, the festival was not without other titles that trained their crosshairs on authoritarianism both past and present.
Panahi’s aforementioned Palme d’Or winner follows a group of freed dissenters debating what they should do with a man they suspect of having tortured them in captivity. It channels the anger and trauma that fester in the aftermath of interrogation by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard—to which Panahi is no stranger. Another dissident filmmaker with a Cannes premiere was Russia’s Kirill Serebrennikov, whose biopic The Disappearance of Josef Mengele both told the post–World War II story of the Nazi “angel of death,” as he absconded across South America, and subtly painted a backdrop in which fascist ideas were allowed to prosper in the countries he frequented—among them Argentina and Brazil.
The latter nation was also the subject of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Best Director and Best Actor winner The Secret Agent led by Wagner Moura, about a man in hiding during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Like Serebrennikov’s movie, it’s a work whose commentary on fascism unravels subtly and gradually. The details of its central premise aren’t even clarified until over an hour into its runtime, if only because it’s a tale of secrecy and mirrors the hushed flow of information necessary to keep one safe from watchful eyes.
Mendonça’s film pairs nicely with an even more abstract work: Óliver Lax’s Sirât, a Spanish production (and eventual Jury Prize winner) that, although not about any one contemporary conflict, captures the feeling of living on a knife’s edge. Set in the Moroccan desert as World War III breaks and E.U. citizens are harbored to safety, the enveloping road adventure follows a middle-aged father joining a group of ravers in order to find his missing teenage daughter, who he believes he’ll find at a party at the end of the world. With thumping bass that creates a sense of foreboding, the film becomes a stress test for its characters as new tragedies befall them at every turn, reflecting the sensation of tumbling down an ever-deepening rabbit hole of despair.
Each of these films is incredibly accomplished. However, the sensations they individually re-create can all be found bunched together in Lapid’s Yes!—which is admittedly far less finessed, if only because it bursts at the seams with the kind of righteous wrath upon which Cannes was originally built.
That Lapid’s movie was featured at all speaks, perhaps, to the cautiously widening room for movies whose dissent tends not to align with Western political interests. However, that Yes! wasn’t platformed to the degree it could have been makes it less likely to find distribution in some territories, including the United States, where movies critical of the Israeli government’s actions (like the Oscar-winning West Bank documentary No Other Land) have had to self-fund their releases. In a political moment where the Trump regime has threatened to deport those protesting the war in Gaza, it’s especially incumbent on American distributors to bridge this divide, though whether Yes! will prove too radioactive for theatrical interests remains to be seen.