Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Photograph: Gerard Julien /AFP
Nationality can be a vexed issue at the Cannes film festival. The flags of many nations flap in the breeze at the International Village and the Croisette is a middle-class melting pot of different accents and dialects. And that's before you even get to the films.
Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart is referred to as the lone British feature in the selection, even though it is backed by an American company, stars two Hollywood actors (Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman) and is based on a book by a Parisian of Afro-Cuban descent (Mariane Pearl). By contrast, the Joy Division biopic Control boasts a Mancunian setting and a crop of British players but barely merits a mention because the director (Anton Corbijn) is Dutch.
Increasingly, however, the film-makers at this year's event seem keen to be regarded as effectively stateless. At yesterday's Death Proof press conference Quentin Tarantino waxed lyrical about the way his career had set him free. "When I was a young guy in LA I never left LA because I was broke," he said. "So one of the best things about being a director is the opportunity it provides to see other places and become a citizen of the world. I remember when I made Reservoir Dogs a friend said to me, 'This is your passport to the planet'."
A few days back I met with the father-daughter film-making team of Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf. Shut out of making movies in his native Iran, Mohsen now predominantly films in Afghanistan and lives in France. Obviously his situation is entirely different from that of Tarantino, and yet he still framed it in similar terms: of being a citizen of the world, of cinema being a common language, all that jazz.
I reckon this is by and large a positive trend, so long as the roots are not forgotten and the local wellspring that fuels these directors' films does not dry up. But sitting next to Mohsen at the table, Samira sounded a note of caution. "My father sees himself as a film-maker without borders," she said. "He sees himself as belonging to the world, but I still see myself as belonging to Iran. In many ways Iran is not a good place to live at the moment but it is still my home. One day I may have to follow my father elsewhere. Maybe he is my future and I am his past."
