What the 2023 Cannes Film Festival Poster, Featuring a Still from ‘Rhapsody in August,’ Means

Every year one of the signposts that the Cannes Film Festival is nigh is the release of that edition’s official poster. The Cannes posters of the past have run the gamut, from the glorified tourism posters of the early years to some of the more witty, playful ones of recent vintage — such as Agnès Varda getting some height help by standing atop an assistant to look into her camera on her debut “La Pointe Courte” for the 2019 festival, or Spike Lee and his giant glasses peeping over the lower edge of the frame in 2021.

In their release of the 2024 festival poster, the organizers commented that each year’s poster “sets the tone” for the festival to come. Many of these in the past have been exuberant and full of the colorful possibilities of cinema. This one in 2024 sets a more muted tone, perhaps fitting for this festival set against a backdrop of horrific war.

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The 2024 Cannes poster comes via a still from Akira Kurosawa’s second-to-last film, 1991’s “Rhapsody in August,” which is a moody character study about the decades-long ripple effects of war. In the film, a family living in Nagasaki, Japan, headed by matriarch Kane (Sachiko Murase), whose husband was killed in the atomic bomb blast there, is at a crossroads. Kane’s children are considering taking an offer to manage their uncle’s pineapple fields in Hawaii: Kane’s brother moved to Hawaii after the war and has become a successful businessman and property owner there. Kane upsets her children by writing to her brother instead that she still finds it very hard to reconcile visiting the U.S. with her feelings about the U.S. atomic bombing of her city that claimed her husband’s life. After receiving her letter, her brother’s son, played by Richard Gere, visits Nagasaki instead and is moved by the commemorations of the bombing in which he takes part.

In the words of the festival organizers, the image from the film they’ve used for the poster of Cannes’ 77th edition, of a family lined up on a bench and dreamily enjoying a common view, “reminds us of the importance of coming together, and seeking harmony in all things.”

It especially evokes the idea of people sharing a communal experience gazing at the same thing at the same time: “Mirroring the movie theater, this poster celebrates the Seventh Art, with naivety and wonder,” their statement adds. “Because it gives everyone a voice, it enables emancipation. Because it remembers wounds, it combats oblivion. Because it bears witness to perils, it calls for union. Because it soothes trauma, it helps repair the living.”

“In a fragile world that constantly questions otherness, the Festival de Cannes reaffirms a conviction: cinema is a universal sanctuary for expression and sharing. A place where our humanity is written as much as our freedom.”

Reflective and quiet… just the tone Cannes needed to strike for this moment of heartbreak and horror, until insouciant images of glamour and revelry and play can feel right again.

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