Directors: Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach, Zhang Yimou and 29 others
Category: III (various languages)
The rationale behind Chacun Son Cinema (To Each His Own Cinema) - an omnibus marking the 60th anniversary of Cannes Film Festival - is for a selected group of veteran directors to create three-minute short films that celebrate the movie house and/or the act of movie-going. The flip side of such a glittering spectacle is that there's no guarantee of quality - such projects are doomed to be uneven in quality and style, a problem usually made worse when self-important master filmmakers are involved.
For instance, just watch Michael Cimino's pretentious piece about a washed-up, leering director filming a Cuban singer and her band, or Jane Campion's film about a man trying to stomp an insect on a stage, the bizarreness of which undermines her intention to offer a metaphor for female filmmakers in a men's world.
Mainland and Hong Kong filmmakers are no better. Rivals to the last, both Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige (above left) mine the hackneyed, cultural-exotica narrative of rural/impoverished children watching films in the open, and Wong Kar-wai simply delivers three minutes of partly obscured faces and feet in a cinema in his trademark slow-mo style.
Youssef Chahine's 47 Years Later is basically an ego trip, a bitter broadside at the Cannes festival over how long he had to wait to get an award at it, and conceited to the point of being hilarious.