The images leave no room for doubt. Cate Blanchett has taken advantage of the impact that her time on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival has had to show her solidarity with Palestine. Fashion has always served to send messages and the actress used her dress to wink at the Palestinian people, who have been experiencing a dramatic situation for months due to Israel’s continuous attacks on the civilian population.
Blanchett has worn at the premiere of ‘The Apprentice’, by Iranian director Ali Abbasi, a haute couture creation by Haider Ackerman for Jean Paul Gaultier. It is a tight black dress with a green train and an almost white pale pink back that is reminiscent of the Palestinian flag. The jewelry she completed the look with is from the Louis Vuitton high jewelry collection.
Haider Ackerman is a designer whose work has earned the respect and admiration of critics and colleagues in the fashion industry. Born in Colombia, he was raised by his adoptive parents between Ethiopia, Chad, Algeria and France due to the work of his father, a cartographer for Amnesty International. Eventually, he settled with his family in the Netherlands, where he had the opportunity to study fashion design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The choice of a Haider Ackerman design is no coincidence, nor is anything that Blanchett and her stylist Elizabeth Stewart put on the red carpet.
Cate Blanchett has arrived in Cannes as a UNHCR goodwill ambassador to give a voice to refugees around the world, from Gaza to the Republic of the Congo, and call for films to be made about their “incredible and inspiring stories”. Blanchett, who has been working with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees since 2015, has traveled halfway around the world to meet these people who have had to flee their homes. In recent months she has been to South Sudan, Jordan and Niger.
“When I started, in 2015, there were 60 million refugees and displaced people and now there are 140 million, it is an enormous number,” Blanchett explained in a panel held at the Cannes Festival headquarters. “It is a global crisis, a global challenge, that should be in more films because cinema is a reflection of reality,” she added. “The stories of refugees are not only about their hard experiences, they speak about their sense of humor and their resilience, they are not monolithic. “There are many stories to tell.”
