Much has been said about The President’s Cake being the first Iraqi film to be shown at Cannes. That’s not exactly true: despite being a worthy winner of both the Best First Film Prize and the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award, Hasan Hadi’s U.S.-Iraq-Qatar co-production isn’t the first film from the country to be screened at the festival.
Beating The President’s Cake to this particular honour is Said Effendi. Making its bow at the Buñuel Theatre at the Palais on 15th May – just a day before the unveiling of Cake at the Theatre Croisette – Kameran Hosni’s film depicts a schoolteacher’s struggle to maintain his composure and sanity when his rivalry with his rough cobbler neighbour turns tatty, then tragic, and finally transcendent.
A social realist piece laced with the odd stylistic flourish in its framing and editing, Hosni’s adaptation of novelist Edmond Sabri’s La Dispute (“The Fight”) is one of the unsung discoveries at Cannes this year. But neither Hosni nor Sabri were present at the festival, as they have both passed away – Said Effendi was produced and released for the first time in Iraq in 1957, when Iraq hosted one of the most burgeoning film industries in the Middle East, a fact that has largely been written out of history today.
Hosni’s magnificent mise-en-scène and his cast’s powerful performance was brought alive at the Cannes Classics programme in a pristine 4K restoration by the Iraqi Cinematheque, an institution established last year by the Iraqi government in collaboration with its French counterparts. Overseen by representatives of the Cinematheque, the restoration was conducted and completed at INA, the French national audio-visual institute.
“A lot of people [at the Cannes screening] were really shocked,” said Wareth Kwaish, the Iraqi filmmaker who led the restoration as the project director of the Iraqi Cinematheque. “People were saying, ‘How was there an Iraqi filmmaker making that good a film and we don’t know him?’”
Speaking to The Film Verdict at Iraq’s first-ever national pavilion at the Cannes Film Market, Kwaish said the restoration started just six months ago. Among the Iraqi Cinematheque’s inventory of 104 fictional features – all shot on 16mm or 35mm film stock from the 1940s to the 2000s – Said Effendi was chosen for its iconic status, and because of the presence of a high-quality negative and a release print with its optical soundtrack intact.
Kwaish brought 26 bobbins of material to Paris and supervised the restoration process, while also submitting the film to the classics section of the Cannes Film Festival. The screenings “really valorised the project and a lot of distribution offers came as well, and we are trying to choose one,” Kwaish said.
“[But] our focus now is to preserve these films, and then, of course, we will distribute them,” said Kwaish, who mentioned at a press conference in Baghdad in February that the Cinematheque is also restoring Iraq’s first-ever motion picture, Anwar Sha-ul’s Alia and Issam (1948).
At Cannes, he told The Film Verdict that the Cinematheque has already agreed to work with CNC on a second project and “another Arab country” on a third. The Cinematheque plans to see in training workshops for young Iraqi archivists and conservationists later this year, with restoration projects to be eventually conducted in a newly constructed lab in Baghdad by the end of 2026.
Said Effendi was just one the few restored Asian gems to be given a new life in the Cannes Classics programme this year. Given how rarely these films were shown – if at all outside their home country – the festival audience might as well consider them as a discovery as the new films making their bow in the other sections at the festival.
The Mumbai-headquartered Film Heritage Foundation brought to Cannes the restoration of Days and Nights in the Forest, Satyajit Ray’s acerbic comedy about a quartet of men trying and floundering in flexing their city-slicker muscles during a fumbling vacation in a small town. A competition entry at the Berlinale in 1970, the film is much less known than Ray’s more familiar Apu trilogy.
Working with Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation and Janus Films/Criterion Collection, and with the access to camera and sound negatives held by rights owner Purnima Dutta, Film Heritage Foundation director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur oversaw an immaculate 4K version which premiered at Cannes. L’Immagine Ritrovata’s restoration reinvigorated the precision and modern ambience in the auteur’s satire about class, patriarchy and urban arrogance — aspects eulogised by director Wes Anderson, who spoke before the screening at Cannes.
Just as importantly, the Foundation — with the backing of the French government — also brought to Cannes The Girls, Sri Lanka’s first woman director Sumitra Peries’ 1978 debut about two young women from a poor family and their quashed dreams of love (with an upper-class boy) and success (as a beauty queen). Belying its seemingly tragic premise, The Girls offers nuances aplenty about the protagonists’ struggles for their own well-being and independence in life, with Peries punctuating her realist storytelling with some poetic mise-en-scène.
“The restoration was incredibly difficult and we had to work with three different elements of the film to bring [The Girls] back to its original glory. I only wish that Sumitra Peries was there with us to see the film,” said Dungarpur, whose restorations of Indian classics have been selected for Cannes Classics since 2022.
“I do believe [film industries in] Asia are becoming more active with restorations,” said Vincent Paul-Boncour, director of the Paris-based specialist distributor Carlotta Films. “What is important, from my point of view, is all this work [that is done] to reach new audiences and to be launched at film festivals.
“It’s not just saying how it’s good to have a movie at Cannes, but that you will reach the 100 people who will be important to the film’s travels as non-commercial releases at film festivals, but also the potential for commercial releases in theatres, VOD, DVD, Blu-ray boxed sets – not just to cinephiles but to a larger audience.”
Paul-Boncour was in Cannes to work on the presentation of a restored version of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi — A One and A Two. A Best Director prize-winner at Cannes in 2000, the film was digitised and released on home video in several territories (including a DVD published by Criterion Collection in 2006) and then vanished from view – especially after the Taiwanese auteur’s passing in 2007.
“We’ve been working for years on this,” said Paul-Boncour. “We knew it was [Japanese entertainment company] Pony Canyon who owned the rights, it was part of their catalogue, and they were doing nothing special. I’ve been going to see them at each market they were present in Asia, to tell them we were interested in the title. There was no 4K restoration and [Yang’s partner] Kaili Peng really pushed them because it would be the 25th anniversary this year.”
As the French distributor of the restored Yi Yi, Paul-Boncour and his Carlotta team has helped Peng and Pony Canyon in securing berths in retrospectives at festivals in La Rochelle and the French Cinematheque, and also in republishing French critic Jean-Michel Frodon’s out-of-print book on the filmmaker.
More importantly, Carlotta also co-ordinated the press campaign for the restoration at Cannes, thus linking Pony Canyon with potential international licensers and festival programmers.
“It’s about how to have a strategy in exploring the movie – it’s not just to buy your film and put it on screen, but also to develop as much action with film festivals as possible,” Paul-Boncour said about his work on restoration projects. “We have to try to make an event, and to have many partners that could bring something stronger in the communication and promotion aspect.”
Paul-Boncour said he’s developing another project with Japanese auteur Seijun Suzuki’s films. At the same time, he has also been scouting for possible projects in Vietnam, where few films have yet to be restored by either its national institutions or international outfits. He compared his new adventure as similar to his work on the 4K restoration of Philippine auteur Lino Brocka’s Bona: working with U.S.-Hong Kong-based specialist label Kani Releasing, Paul-Boncour helped locate the film’s rights owners, oversaw its restoration, and ushered it to Cannes Classics last year.
“For Vietnam, you have to go there to meet rights owners, to show them what you’re doing,” he said. “They won’t come to you because they do things differently -– they might think it’s strange somebody from France or the UK could be interested to release all these titles from the 1970s and 1980s, when people [there] are mostly interested in new things on their iPhones… These are territories where the market for physical objects like Blu Ray doesn’t even exist.”
While there’s certainly competition from distributors from the same territory for the rights of certain films, he said, he is open to collaborations with his peers from outside France.
“We could sometimes work together, like on Bona, to make things happen,” he said. “If you are doing it just by yourself, it would cost more –- but it’s also nice to collaborate, as it inspires real creativity… It’s always good to see that even in some small ways, the work you made for your territory could also serve the rest of the world.”
