Paul Mescal and Oliver Hermanus (The History of Sound)
Respective award winners for the Caméra d’Or and the Queer Palm, Paul Mescal and Oliver Hermanus find themselves in the official competition section for the first time at Cannes, for The History of Sound. They compare this specific experience to “entering an amphitheater” and deeply understand the singularity of it, while reflecting on other screenings, at this festival and beyond, that have retooled their understanding of cinema as well.
“When I was here fourteen years ago, I went to the premiere of The Tree of Life,” Hermanus recalls. “I’d never been to the Palais before, I’d never seen a film in that context, I’d never seen so many people in one room watching a movie. The impact of that movie on that size of a screen, I’ve never forgotten that. I still have the ticket stub.”
For Mescal, the most seismic experience was more recent, instead with a Berlin winner: “Very recently I saw No Other Land, I remember sitting in a packed-out theater in Brooklyn, and being so profoundly upset that film hadn’t, at that point, received distribution there. It was a story that I felt needed to be told the most, and it was being almost censored. The feeling in the room was one of great fear and sadness—it felt like the film was bigger than the four walls in which we were watching it. People were standing up at the end and having these wild arguments. A man stood up in front of me at the end and went, ‘What are we doing?’ That was a big one.”
