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Thierry Frémaux, the Cannes cinema Festival's director, spoke to a room full of documentary cinema fans at the Salon des Ambassadeurs this year about his worries about the quantity of documentaries nominated for the festival.
He talked before to the awarding of the l'Oeil d'or (Golden Eye) award, which is granted to the best documentary at Cannes.
"Documentaries are a minority at the Cannes Film Festival. There have been documentaries in the past, but just a handful," Frémaux conceded. He continued: "But it's true that over the past few years, there have been many more."
He noted the difficulty documentary films confront in a festival that mostly favors narrative cinema, stating, "[With] your minority position, you might always feel a bit repressed. You're not. I can promise you right now that there is proof. The proof, this reward; the proof, this jury, these individuals who are present."
Despite those reassuring statements, the figures and Deadline's Matthew Carey paint a different image. There were no documentary films among the more than 20 movies contending for the coveted Palme d'or award.
This essentially excludes documentary films from the festival's top accolade. In reality, only two documentaries have won the Palme d'or in Cannes' lengthy history: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004, which many feel won for its political effect more than cinematic skill, and Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle's The Silent World in 1956.
Documentaries have been an integral element of film since its inception.
The Lumière Brothers' films Exiting the Lumière Factory in Lyon and Fishing for Goldfish were among the first projected movies created in the late 1800s, primarily short actualities or early documentaries.
Later, famous films such as Nanook of the North (1922) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) helped establish the genre. The latter is still acknowledged as one of the finest pictures ever created, in any media.
This year's L'Oeil d'Or went to Imago, directed by Chechen director Déni Oumar Pitsaev. His documentary debuted during Critics Week, one of Cannes' unofficial sidebars.
"It's nice that there are more and more documentaries in Cannes," Pitsaev remarked after accepting the award. "But maybe it's time that we weren't in the back room and instead were considered just cinema." Wasn't documentary also the origin of cinema?"
Even Un Certain Regard, the festival's official sidebar, included no documentaries among its 20 films. "It's 20 films," Pitsaev said, "and no documentaries."
Despite the rising awareness of documentaries, it is unclear if Cannes is ready to completely embrace nonfiction as a fundamental pillar of its celebration of world film.
