The movie so offensive it was cancelled by Cannes
Comedy and controversy have often gone hand-in-hand, but there’s a distinct line between pushing the boundaries to see how far they’re willing to stretch, and being controversially antagonising just for the sake of it. When it came to the Cannes Film Festival, the organisers knew where to draw that line.
Bizarrely, though, French comedian Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala’s The Anti-Semite wasn’t pulled from the schedule until it had already been announced, meaning somebody had to give it the thumbs-up somewhere along the line. It wasn’t screening in competition, but was set to be shown as part of the Cannes Film Market, which runs concurrently with the festival and sees filmmakers presenting their wares to prospective buyers.
Pushing the boundaries of bad taste, M’Bala M’Bala’s directorial debut saw him starring as a violent alcoholic who dresses as a Nazi to attend a party, with Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson recruited to play an on-screen cameo role. Unsurprisingly, the backlash was fierce.
Cannes Film Market executive director Jerome Paillard addressed the situation by stating, “our general conditions ban the presence of all films threatening public order or religious convictions, as well as pornographic films or those inciting violence”, which again begs the question of how The Anti-Semite was initially approved in the first place.
The Anti-Defamation League also weighed in on Cannes’ stance, with national director Abraham H. Foxman welcoming “the clear statement to that effect from the organisers of the film festival”. Hinting towards one of the film’s producers, he would also note that “Dieudonne’s grotesque anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial may play well to audiences in Iran, but the French entertainment industry and society has clearly had enough”.
The Iranian Documentary and Experimental Film Center were backers of The Anti-Semite, an unsavoury socio-political scenario in and of itself, never mind the fact the movie was directed by somebody who had been fined at least six times between 2006 and 2010 for either making comments, jokes, or statements that had been deemed offensive to the Jewish faith and various Jewish public figures, with his cumulative pay-outs running into hundreds of thousands of Euros.
M’Bala M’Bala would eventually release his first feature anyway and sell it to anybody willing to hand over their cash to something so blatantly abhorrent, but not without adding a self-aggrandising disclaimer that sought to play up to the controversy it had generated.
“This film has no distribution agreement, and its dissemination is prohibited on the territory of France and in countries that have ratified the Geneva conventions”, it read with a skull and crossbones underneath per Tablet, “But as the French legislature has no authority in the ‘international zone,’ watching it cannot be prohibited in nonaligned areas, neutral seas, and in space.”
