On Day 2 of Cannes, Paul Laverty walked to a microphone and said what the institution would not.

"Isn't it fascinating," the screenwriter and jury member asked, "to see someone like Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo blacklisted because of their views in opposing the murder of women and children in Gaza." He paused. "Shame on Hollywood." [1]

The room had no one positioned to respond on Hollywood's behalf. That is the story. The paper's May 12 account established that Park Chan-wook governs Cannes taste and that the festival opened under protest-year conditions with Hollywood already absent — Day 2 confirmed both readings and merged them into a single moment at a microphone.

This paper established when Park Chan-wook was named jury president that his appointment concentrated aesthetic authority in a filmmaker whose work has never been indifferent to power. It established when Cannes opened with Salvadori's comedy that Hollywood's absence and the year's protest conditions would define the festival more than its competition slate. Day 2 confirmed both readings and merged them.

Park Chan-wook set the frame before Laverty sharpened it. At the jury press conference, Park stated that "art and politics are not concepts that are in conflict with each other" and that no film could be disqualified on the grounds that it carried a political message — nor praised for lacking one. [2] This was not a neutral statement about artistic pluralism. It was the jury president of the world's most important film festival announcing that his court would not distinguish between political and aesthetic judgment.

Laverty's remarks were the application. Sarandon, who appears on this year's Cannes poster, lost her agency in 2025 after publicly calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Bardem and Ruffalo have faced similar industry pressure. Laverty named them. No studio representative was on the Croisette to dispute the characterization or offer a different account of what happened to those careers. [1]

This is the institutional vacuum the jury has moved into. For the first time since 2017, not a single major Hollywood studio has a film in competition. The major distributors have minimal acquisitions team presence on the ground. The reasons given by studio executives range from completion timing to the cost of A-list security in a Mediterranean resort town to the calculation that a Palais premiere for a film opening months later generates more risk than reward. None of those explanations names Gaza. [3]

Into that gap has moved Neon, the specialty distributor that has backed six consecutive Palme d'Or winners. Neon has nine films at this year's festival. It is the primary US flag on the Croisette. Its presence is conspicuous not because Neon is large — it isn't — but because every other American institutional voice has gone home, leaving Neon and a jury president from Seoul to define what American cinema means at this festival in this year. [3]

Demi Moore, also on the jury, offered a different register. She said she hoped political statements would not distract from the films themselves and that self-censorship would shut down the core of creativity. [2] The comment was diplomatically placed between the two poles. It did not change the direction of travel.

Behind all of this sits a structural reality in European distribution that shapes which companies and which films are even present to fill the American vacuum. Vincent Bolloré's media consolidation has reshaped the European distribution landscape. Which European companies feel free to acquire aggressively at Cannes and which operate under constraint is not a question the festival officially addresses — but it shapes the market's composition as surely as the studio absences shape the competition slate.

Park Chan-wook is running Cannes like a court. He has a jury, a defendant, and a charge. The defendant is a Hollywood industry that, in his jury's framing, has criminalized solidarity with Gaza. The charge is moral cowardice. The verdict, in the form of the Palme d'Or, comes at the end of the week.

There is no one in the room from the defense.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London