Cannes and the Language of Exile

There was a time when Cannes’ strangest species was the ‘Euro pudding’: prestige films assembled from several funding bodies, multiple languages and a cast drawn from every corner of the continent, all set in a recognisable but oddly deracinated Europe. They were designed to travel internationally and often ended up travelling nowhere at all. There were notable exceptions. Luchino Visconti and David Lean’s extravaganzas come to mind. This year, large European co-productions returned to Cannes in force. Yet they produced some of the festival’s strongest films: works obsessed with displacement, exile and cultural friction.