Cannes Festival 2008 Films: Getting Real

A commentary in yesterdays local newspaper "Nice Matin" complained about the lack of films in the festival this year that were based on actual scriptwriting. It observed that storytelling and human imagination seem to have taken the backseat in favor of turning "real life" material into a movie. Looking at the films that were shown in the last two weeks, there is a lot of truth in this - there was what might be called a "portrait of your favorite fallen star" section with the films on Mike Tyson, Diego Maradona and Che. The Chelsea Hotel got portrayed (another falling star, if you want). The Clint Eastwood movie is based on an actual story - and the list goes on.

The Cannes Film Festival often being an indication of bigger trends in the movie industry (witness their focus on Bollywood a few years back right before Indian movies became popular world-wide), this could be the sign of another trend: art movies turning into an elaborate form of Reality TV, with less emphasis on scriptwriting, following the current move towards "real" (and also "cheap") content in other media (television, blogs).