Read more  The Queer Palm is not among the awards officially presented during the festival. Since 2010, this trophy has rewarded a film for its treatment of LGBTQIA+ themes among those presented in all the selections combined.
Is this Queer Palm a good idea? A salutary spotlight on themes and characters that are still too underrepresented on screen in 2023? Or is it, as Xavier Dolan thinks, for example, not counterproductive to distinguish, to set apart an LGBTQIA+ prize like that?
With Nicolas Maury, actor, known to the general public thanks to the role of Hervé in the series Dix pour Cent; director, his first film was released three years ago, Garçon Chiffon; and singer, his first album released by Warner is called La Porcelaine de Limoges. He was president of the jury of this Queer Palm in Cannes in 2021.
What is the Queer Palm? In 2010, it was a journalist Franck Finance-Madureira who invented the Queer Palm. It is therefore an award given at the Cannes Film Festival outside the rest of the prize list. But this Queer Palm is not totally unrelated to the selection since the film that will receive it is one of the films chosen by the festival.
In Germany, the Teddy Award, the Berlin Film Festival's equivalent of the Queer Palm, is part of the awards. In 1987, the first film to receive it was Pedro Almodovar's Law of Desire, which was not yet known. In Cannes, the very first Queer Palm was given to Kaboom, by director Gregg Araki. Last year, it was Joyland, by Saim Sadiq, that was awarded. This year, it will be the American filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell who will take this task.
A question of perspectiveThe Queer Palm is a prize that rewards films that say something interesting about the LGBTQIA+ community. Nicolas Maury explains what queer means to him: "It would be like a country that would still contain something liquid and free about identity, about gender issues or answers too."
For him, it is more broadly a liberating artistic movement, as he explains: "There is conservatism in certain selections too, I find. There is not necessarily a renewal of the people who are at the head of certain selections. You have to know that all international festivals change roughly every four or five years, which is normal. So for me, queer is also inviting people to your table who normally are not."
He also talks about the moment when one of the members of the Queer Palm jury, in 2011, was unable to climb the steps of Cannes, because she was wearing a very classy jumpsuit and big shoes: "It's still an art festival. We can also calm down on the Cannes side of blow-dry, satin and then bow tie. Well, it's good, but it also needs to be renewed. And that's also sometimes in the films themselves. That's why the Queer Palm is always a counter-power too. It's interesting as a counter-power. So afterwards, if it one day becomes the power, it's annoying maybe, but as a counter-power, I think it's good that it exists."
It's a question of perspective and not of subject, as Nicolas Maury explains, regarding the 2013 Palme d'Adèle, La Vie d'Adèle, by Abdellatif Kechiche: "He's an immense filmmaker with whom I dream of working one day perhaps. But I didn't like this film. I don't like the perspective of this film. Precisely, it's not a queer perspective. And to give you an example, of someone whose orientation would be rather heterosexual, but I don't know, it's Jacques Audiard, with Les Olympiades. For me, it's a queer film for example, and it was the first Audiard film that I found queer. It's a film that surprised me a lot because we didn't expect a film like that from Audiard. He made a very free, very fluid, very gender fluid film."
Queer characters in fiction, still on the fringes? For Nicolas Maury, today, we want to fill all the boxes: "There has to be a trans person, there has to be an Arab character. There really has to be all the boxes, even for the CNC, while I think we've forgotten one thing, which is that a filmmaker, normally, in a movie theater, is someone who dominates our gaze. For example, as a spectator [...] I need to be subjected to a gaze. And for me, that's really what the Queer Palm rewards, it's this signature of a filmmaker*."
For him, queer characters are often relegated to the background, but that is starting to change: "I think that this is starting to change with some absolutely major first films in recent years, with filmmakers like Yann Gonzalez, like Mikael Buch, or even like Céline Sciamma who are nevertheless opening the doors to all of this."
The film industryAt the end of the show, Nicolas Maury reacted to Adèle Haenel's decision to leave the film industry: "I don't like this state of being a victim because for me, I think that I am, in fact. So, I'm not interested in saying it. What really interests me, as they say in Chekhov, is that you have to know how to endure. I find it beautiful to endure, but at a certain point, sometimes, you can't endure in an industry that you no longer like. And if she no longer likes the industry, I think there are reasons why she talks about it, and maybe they are reasons why I don't like it sometimes, I love it and I don't like it. […] She gets trashed by haters, like Blanche Gardin who dared, I think, to say things. I salute these women. They really move things forward, artists and art."
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53 min 

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