November 21 - December 9

iEstablished in 1969, the Cannes festival’s Directors’ Fortnight (or Quinzaine des Réalisateurs) has always had a slightly different raison d’être than most sections or programmes at major festivals. In 1968, Cannes had the misfortune of coinciding with widespread disturbances throughout France, beginning with, depending on who you believe, student protests in Nanterre or the firing of Cinémathèque française founder and director Henri Langlois by then Minister of Culture, André Malraux. The student protests were met with a disastrous overreaction by the police and a large percentage of leftist and even centrist filmmakers and unionists sided with the students in solidarity. François Truffaut made it his personal mission to shut the festival down and he was aided by Louis Malle, the jury chairman, and long-time friend Jean-Luc Godard. (Malle and his brother had been roughed up by Parisian police right before the festival, which he said immediately put him on the side of the students.) The events of May ‘68 became a cultural touchstone, effectively dividing French society into those who participated and those who opposed.

The Directors’ Fortnight was created to respond to this new political reality and to showcase filmmakers and film movements that otherwise wouldn’t have been invited to the party. It reflected a kind of democratization of the festival structure. (One of the more widespread complaints about the government, and the festival, the previous year was that they were high-handed, autocratic, and out of touch.) But in practice, the programme had a much stronger, far more politicized rationale, a significant breakthrough given the long-standing separation between politics and film in French culture (evinced by the near total absence of the disastrous French experience in Algeria from French movie screens) and at Cannes in particular. The impact of the Fortnight’s birth was felt almost immediately, leading to the establishment of similar programmes at Venice and Berlin, the two other major European festivals at the time.

Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, one of the original Fortnight founders and directors, asserted that the section’s objective was “to open up the selection to include independently made films. . . .We wanted the festival programming to expand to represent the independent auteur