Cannes Film Festival 2012 - Pornography Licensed to Thrill

Here in the rain of Cannes 2012 is from left to right, Calum Johnson, (Director of Little District), actor Darren Enright and Mairi Sutherland outside the Film Screening Cinema. Despite several down pours from an unusual amount of rain in May for the Cannes Film Market, the screenings of the films Little District and Villains, supported by Palm Tree Entertainment, were well attended with a respectable number of film distributors. Stealth Media helmed by the Michael Cowan has taken up handling the sales of these two pictures. Some of the rest of the film catalogue is going on to Screen Media and other trusted sales consultants.

Above Robbie Moffat director of Villains with the actors of the film Darren Enright and Chris Bearne. Whilst Palm Tree Entertainment achieved, its goals for the festival tinged with success garnered from years in the business, I could not help noticing many aspects of the Festival organisation and selection which are often ignored by many film makers in their clamour for recognition. At first it is not entirely noticeable that there is an accepted and increasingly oppressive assumption by the Festival Organizers that women must adhere to traditional social mores of being submissive, non-creative, social appendages, whose sole purpose is to become a sex object or a clothes horse, the two not being mutually exclusive to each other. But how do I substantiate such a claim in 2012 when apparently women have supposedly been liberated? One only has to look at the type of films choosen by the Selection Committee to see that things have not moved along in France for Women. The film in competition Post Tenebras Lux certainly raised the bar on this subject by controversially showing women in a bad light, through a pornographic scene placed gratuitously inside a story about bad parents living in a rural area of Mexico. The scene in question was set in a Turkish bath, not something found in Mexico, where it seems the locals had orgies there regularly. The orgy commenced with the homosexual violent rape of boys in a toilet, though not clearly seen by the audience because this was filmed in the distance, the impact of the action was never the less the same - pornographic. The rest of the scene shows a nubile female being pimped to boys by an older women, who holds her while she has sex with one of them. The girl then thanks the older women for helping her, which is a laughable moment in that any women being taken by a few boys in a public bath is certainly not going to like it. In this sickening moment I realized that this was no better than a sleazy pornography story of the kind one avoided on foreign adult channels. As if the pornography was not enough on its own, the French added insult to injury, by rewarding the film director of Post Tenebras Lux with the Best Director Prize. Their defense is that the story line was pointing out parental corruption, but I would argue that this could have been achieved with a better script and without the pornography. Sadly such a story is not a one off because another film with pornographic content was Korean Film 'A Taste of Money' crafted by the accomplished Hang Sang-Soo. While the film was about the corruption which money brings to a political elite, the film was cheapened by a scene that showed 3 'servants' performing fellatio, while clad in pseudo sadomasochistic outfits. One can only assume that film directors of this calabre know that such sex scenes give their film selling power, but they fail to see the social effects on women. Janette Price Ward a PR consultant for many film companies in Cannes over the years, said that the sexual content of many films 'In Competition' could be judged by the easy availability of tickets for these films, because their box office was not guarded or valued by the French organizers. She went on to say that sexual content was a common prerequisite for films selected for 'In Competition' Section of the Festival. She also had a bee in her bonnet not just about the casual preponderance of pornography in most competition films she had seen over the years but also how the Red Carpet tickets were dispensed. She said the Red carpet was mainly only to a French elite of Cannes, and not the Market Du Film goers who paid for the festival with their badge registrations. ( More about this later in another blog) I began to wonder how many films 'En Competition' had had gratuitous sexual content in them because I had only managed to get Red Carpet Tickets for two of the films, thus confirming Janet's hypothesis. Whatever is the case, any film that has what could be regarded as a legal definition of pornography, should not be honored by the Selection Committee. In that this is ignored, shows how much women's rights are disregarded at the Cannes Film Festival.

Me with wet hair at the Cannes Film festival Oh La La! And just in time to meet Euan McGregor! But it seems many agree about this, and only mutter under their breath, rather than trying to speak out for fear of being seen to criticize the autocratic selection process. Some close to that process this year did seem uneasy about the way women were portrayed. In a chance meeting with the actor Euan Mcgregor who was on the Jury for the Festival, I found him voicing concern that he had not seen enough Female Film Director's Films. In discussing it with him, he suggested that as a female film director I was indeed a rare commodity and he was unsettled about how women were treated generally in the film business, if not just in France. So people like him had noticed something was not quite right about how the selectors had related to Women, so it was not just me then! A few weeks earlier the Guardian Newspaper had also commented on the small number of female film directors selected in Cannes. Considering that only 6 percent of women are working as film directors reveals how much sexual chauvinism exists in keeping this statistic in place while conversely 94 percent of men are holding the position of authority as film directors. Nor has the number of female producers of film increased with only 15 percent making this grade. The most powerful industry in the world perpetuates the most powerful discrimination against women in the world! Few Arab Spring Film Makers! Furthermore the absence of the Arab Spring Film makers except for one Egyptian Film in Competition further showed how completely out of touch the Festival Selection Committee was with the rest of the world. The planet had seen several revolutions since last year but you would never know from the Cannes Film Festival Selection. The Arab voice is strongly needed if only to correct the over insistence and misuse of pornography against women, which is rightly condemned in Arabic settings. Again a chance meeting lead me further to see how Cannes Film festival organizers have fallen into the abusive practices, which maintain the oppression of women. A young girl, on her way back home, had just resigned from her job as a Stewardess on a Yacht in the Harbour of the Cannes Riviera. I asked her why she had done this. She explained that it was commonly expected that as well as serving the guests they might also perform sexual favours for the Yacht owners. She was not going to prostitute herself. She was off to get another job despite the incentive of earning over 20,000 in one season. She was concerned about her friend who had stayed, because she had been threatened for not complying with the 'sexual requirement' of the job. She was a strong girl and she was angered by what she had seen as the wealthy elite forcing hidden forms of 'prostitution' in the guise of a service industry. So this is the under belly of the Cannes Film Festival. Inside the veneer of the glitter and 'gold' the fact is, women are still treated as second class citizens in 2012. Changing this will not be easy unless actors and film directors refuse to participate in the sexual exploitation of their art and stop ignoring the blurred line between sex and pornography. There is also a bigger social message that is being missed in Cannes Film festival by ignoring the impact of pornography on society. The court case involving the 12 year old on the Isle of Skye, who raped 3 girls while accessing internet porn sites, shows how the innocent can be mislead by pornography into believing it is an ordinary form of sexual expression. It falls on institutions like the Cannes Film Festival to take a more responsible approach to the promulgation of pornography by refusing to showcase it no matter how good the rest of a film may appear. What is galling is that a voice which represents only 6 percent of the film industry is hardly likely to be loud enough to drown out the advocates of porn who seem to be in control of the selection process itself.

Mairi Sutherland 'Producer Film Direstor' with Janet Price Ward, Public Relations Specialist