Cannes jury president Juliette Binoche drew criticism on Tuesday for refusing to answer a question at the film festival’s opening press conference about why she hadn’t signed an open letter denouncing industry “silence” and “passivity” following the killing of Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona in an Israeli air strike last month. (Hassona is one of the subjects of Sepideh Farsi’s documentary about the conflict in Gaza, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, which premieres on Thursday at the festival.) “You might find out later,” Binoche had told the journalist elusively. At the festival’s opening ceremony just a few hours later, Binoche, clad in a hooded white gown, took the stage and spoke passionately about Hassona. “On the 16th of last April, at dawn in Gaza, at the age of 25, the photojournalist Fatma Hassona and ten of her relatives were killed by a missile that struck their house,” Binoche said before quoting a poem by Hassona about her own death, written before she died. “The night before her death, she learned that the film in which she appeared was selected here at Cannes,” added Binoche. “Fatma should have been among us tonight.”
Binoche’s full remarks are below:
“Artists have the possibility to bear witness for others. The higher the level of suffering, the more vital their involvement. Wars, miseries, climate change, misogyny — our barbarism’s demons give us no respite. The wind of sorrows is so violent today and sweeps up the weakest — the hostages of October 7 and all the hostages — the prisoners, the drowned, who endure terror and die in a terrible feeling of abandonment and indifference. Against the immensity of this storm, we must create softness; transform our fragmented visions in newfound trust; heal our ignorance; let go of our fears, our egoism; change course; and, when faced with hubris, restore humidity — humility! Humidity, from humus, which is humility. We need to give it back its rightful place.
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“In every region in the world, artists are fighting every day and making an art of this resistance.
“On the 16th of last April, at dawn in Gaza, at the age of 25, the photojournalist Fatma Hassona and ten of her relatives were killed by a missile that struck their house. She had written, ‘My death went through me / the bullet of the assailant went through me / and I became an angel / in the eyes of a city / immense, bigger than my dreams / bigger than this city. / I became a saintly poet in the eyes of a forest / making myself a hermit / and taking a cypress as an offering.’
“The night before her death, she learned that the film in which she appeared was selected here at Cannes. Fatma should have been among us tonight. Art remains. It’s the powerful testimony of our lives, our dreams, and we the viewers, we embrace it. May Cannes, where everything can change, contribute to that.”
The Latin word for “earth” or “ground.”
