A few hours before the fireworks display on July 14 illuminated the Croisette, and three days before the closing ceremony, a first prize list was made at the Cannes Film Festival 2021. That of the Critics’ Week which, for sixty years, highlights first and second feature films from around the world, as well as several short films. To name but a few, Jacques Audiard, Ken Loach, François Ozon, Wong Kar-wai, Leos Carax, Julia Ducournau, Amos Gitaï, Guillermo del Toro… have passed into this category, which has helped to reveal them.
This year, nearly a thousand feature films were screened by Charles Tesson, the general delegate of the Week, and his selection committee. Only seven were selected – all already winners one would be tempted to say at this level of the competition. Except that the award ceremony is inevitably disappointing. Among them, surely, Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, the Finnish director born in Mogadishu, Somalia, whose very beautiful film – of love and survival – The Gravedigger’s Wife (The Gravedigger’s Wife), shot in the heart of the city of Djibouti, left empty-handed.
Pictorial plans
However, we cannot blame the jury chaired by Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu (Palme d’or in 2007 for 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days) which legitimately awarded its Grand Prix to the film, without a shadow of a doubt, the most confusing, astonishing and brilliant of the seven feature films of the Week: Feathers, by the Egyptian Omar El Zohairy. A story not to be believed, in which the absurd infiltrates reality without blinking, where grime and misery find favor in the composition and the chiaroscuro of pictorial planes of striking beauty. In a few words: on the birthday of his 4-year-old son, for which he invited a conjurer, a father finds himself transformed … into a chicken, after a rather crappy magic trick. The scene stretches out, becomes irresistible.
The father disappeared in favor of the poultry, his wife remained up to then head down, confined to silence and domestic chores, will have to and be able to take her place. This birth – which finally brings her out of the house, to meet others, to take charge of the family budget – is the subject of the film. Which gives no name to its characters, no geography to the places, and no other horizon than the building, the pipes and the chimneys of a mining company. In this no man’s land a woman is born, a chicken dies, resuscitates a beggar. And discover a filmmaker whose next film we are already impatiently awaiting.
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