Thierry Frémaux, the chief of the Cannes Film Festival, addressed a room full of nonfiction film lovers at the Salon des Ambassadeurs this year about the concerns over number of documentaries nominated at the festival.
He spoke before the presentation of the l’Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) award, the top prize given to a documentary at Cannes.
“Documentaries are a minority within the Cannes Film Festival. There have been documentaries in the past, but very few,” Frémaux admitted. He added, “But it’s true that over the past few years, there have been many more.”
He acknowledged the challenge nonfiction films face at a festival that largely celebrates narrative cinema, saying, “[With] your minority status, you can always feel a little oppressed. You are not. I can reassure you right away that there is proof. The proof, this prize; the proof, this jury, these people who are here.”
Still, despite those words of reassurance, the numbers, and Deadline‘s Matthew Carey paint a different picture. Of the more than 20 titles competing for the prestigious Palme d’or, not one was a documentary.
That effectively shuts nonfiction films out of the festival’s top honor. In fact, only two documentaries in Cannes’ long history have ever won the Palme d’or — Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004, which many believe won more for its political impact than cinematic technique, and The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle in 1956.
Documentaries have been part of cinema since its earliest days.
In the late 1800s, films like Exiting the Lumière Factory in Lyon and Fishing for Goldfish, directed by the Lumière Brothers, were among the first projected movies ever made — essentially short actualities, or early documentaries.
Later, landmark works like Nanook of the North (1922) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) helped define the genre. The latter is still regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, across all formats.
This year, the l’Oeil d’or went to Imago, directed by Déni Oumar Pitsaev, a Chechen filmmaker. His documentary premiered during Critics Week, one of Cannes’ unofficial sidebars.
“It’s nice that there are more and more documentaries in Cannes,” Pitsaev said after receiving the award. “But it’s maybe time that we’re not in the back room, but that it’s considered just cinema. Wasn’t cinema born in documentary as well?”
Even Un Certain Regard, an official sidebar at the festival, had no documentaries among its 20-film lineup. “It’s 20 films,” Pitsaev pointed out, “and no documentaries.”
Despite the growing recognition of documentaries, the question remains whether Cannes is ready to fully embrace nonfiction as a central pillar of its celebration of global cinema.
