Jury president Ruben Östlund struck a defiant note of optimism on the opening day of the 76th Cannes film festival, positioning the event as a stronghold of community in an increasingly atomised world. Cinema, he said, was more relevant and valuable than ever. The challenge is to connect it with a younger, post-pandemic audience that prefers to gorge its entertainment online.
“If you look at today’s world, you see that cinema is unique for the simple reason that it offers a room where we can all watch films together,” he said. “All the other content, we’re accessing it on our devices, in our little bubbles, consuming culture like zombies and not reflecting what we’re looking at. So going to the cinema is almost a political stance. We come together and have a conversation about the world. We find out who we are and where we’re going. That is cinema’s strongest selling point. I think people want that collective experience.”
