“To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it.” (Charlie Chaplin)
Wanderlust Ice & Ink – Art Review: Comedy as Resistance, Comedy as Resistance, What the 22nd Monte-Carlo Film Festival Reveals About Our Time. (c)MCFF Media Relations MONACO
The Monte-Carlo Film Festival de la Comédie is one of the world’s leading film festivals dedicated entirely to comedy cinema. Founded and directed by Italian actor, filmmaker, and TV personality Ezio Greggio, the festival takes place each year in the Principality of Monaco, under the High Patronage of H.S.H. Prince Albert II and with the support of the Italian Embassy.
Created to elevate and legitimize comedy within the international film landscape, the festival showcases world premieres, international premieres, European productions, films from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, and a special section dedicated to short-form comedies through the Short Comedy Award. Over the years, it has become a respected cultural institution known for bringing together acclaimed actors and directors, rising talents, industry professionals, and audiences who value cinema that blends humour with social insight. Its programme includes film screenings, masterclasses, press conferences, jury discussions, and a prestigious gala evening hosted at the Grimaldi Forum.
Today, the Monte-Carlo Film Festival stands as a platform where comedy is not treated as entertainment alone, but as a form of cultural expression capable of reflecting political, social, and human realities with irony, sensitivity, and intelligence. It positions itself almost like a cinematic counter-voice: a place where comedies from Argentina, Germany, Cuba, Italy, France, Spain, Algeria and Denmark observe, question, and sometimes gently mock the contradictions of our time. Here, comedy is not considered a lesser genre. It is recognised as one of the most accessible and universally loved forms of storytelling. Through humour, irony, and a certain bittersweet elegance, the films selected this year explore power, identity, family, memory, and the desire for freedom — without pretending that laughter erases darkness. It simply makes it bearable, and above all, visible. In his message to the festival’s friends and audience, Ezio Greggio did not soften the context. He spoke of wars, daily brutality, social tensions, and the erosion of culture whenever violence replaces dialogue.
Created to elevate and legitimize comedy within the international film landscape, the festival showcases world premieres, international premieres, European productions, films from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, and a special section dedicated to short-form comedies through the Short Comedy Award. Over the years, it has become a respected cultural institution known for bringing together acclaimed actors and directors, rising talents, industry professionals, and audiences who value cinema that blends humour with social insight. Its programme includes film screenings, masterclasses, press conferences, jury discussions, and a prestigious gala evening hosted at the Grimaldi Forum.
Today, the Monte-Carlo Film Festival stands as a platform where comedy is not treated as entertainment alone, but as a form of cultural expression capable of reflecting political, social, and human realities with irony, sensitivity, and intelligence. It positions itself almost like a cinematic counter-voice: a place where comedies from Argentina, Germany, Cuba, Italy, France, Spain, Algeria and Denmark observe, question, and sometimes gently mock the contradictions of our time. Here, comedy is not considered a lesser genre. It is recognised as one of the most accessible and universally loved forms of storytelling. Through humour, irony, and a certain bittersweet elegance, the films selected this year explore power, identity, family, memory, and the desire for freedom — without pretending that laughter erases darkness. It simply makes it bearable, and above all, visible. In his message to the festival’s friends and audience, Ezio Greggio did not soften the context. He spoke of wars, daily brutality, social tensions, and the erosion of culture whenever violence replaces dialogue.
A Jury That Embodies Different Cinematic Worlds
A Jury That Embodies Different Cinematic Worlds. (c) Media Relations MONACO
To carry this vision, the festival brought together a jury that is itself a statement: four artists, four trajectories, four ways of inhabiting cinema. At its head, Italian actress and director Claudia Gerini serves as Jury President. With roles ranging from Sono pazzo di Iris Blond to La Sconosciuta and L’Ordine del Tempo, she moves easily between popular Italian comedies and more dramatic, auteur-driven cinema. Her presence reflects exactly what this festival celebrates: a refusal to choose between lightness and depth.
Alongside her, as Honorary President, is Franco Nero, a legend of Italian and international cinema. From Django to Camelot, from collaborations with Luis Buñuel to Claude Chabrol and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, he brings with him a long memory of how European cinema has dealt with violence, power, and the human condition. His career embodies the bridge between classic cinema and contemporary reflection. The jury is completed by Teresa Riott, Spanish actress known for the success of the Netflix series Valeria and for her eclectic film work such as El Inmortal, and Daniel McVicar, American actor, director and producer, familiar to television audiences worldwide through his role in The Bold and the Beautiful and now working between Italy and the United States.
Together, they represent different industries, generations, and ways of telling stories, from streaming productions to long-running TV sagas and European cinema. It is the image of a festival that understands that comedy today travels across formats, platforms and continents, but still carries the same mission: to look at people closely and with a certain tenderness, even when the subjects are sharp.
Alongside her, as Honorary President, is Franco Nero, a legend of Italian and international cinema. From Django to Camelot, from collaborations with Luis Buñuel to Claude Chabrol and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, he brings with him a long memory of how European cinema has dealt with violence, power, and the human condition. His career embodies the bridge between classic cinema and contemporary reflection. The jury is completed by Teresa Riott, Spanish actress known for the success of the Netflix series Valeria and for her eclectic film work such as El Inmortal, and Daniel McVicar, American actor, director and producer, familiar to television audiences worldwide through his role in The Bold and the Beautiful and now working between Italy and the United States.
Together, they represent different industries, generations, and ways of telling stories, from streaming productions to long-running TV sagas and European cinema. It is the image of a festival that understands that comedy today travels across formats, platforms and continents, but still carries the same mission: to look at people closely and with a certain tenderness, even when the subjects are sharp.
The Art of Sharing
The Movies Selection. (c) MCFF Media Relations MONACO
Each edition has its own undercurrent, a thematic thread that runs quietly through the programme. This year, it was food. Not as decoration, not as lifestyle imagery, but as an answer to something much more brutal. While the world witnesses famine used as a weapon of mass destruction, the festival programmers, Francesca Palleschi and Luca Di Leonardo, imagined a selection that turns food into an act of resistance: cooking, eating, sitting at the same table, sharing a meal, planning an escape over dessert. The films become an ode to the simple physical act of feeding oneself and others, a gesture of joy, of care, and sometimes of rebellion.
In La cena by Manuel Gómez Pereira and Comandante Fritz by Pavel Giroud, the table is set in the shadow of dictatorships. Franco in Spain and Castro in Cuba appear as parodic, almost grotesque figures presiding over absurd banquets. Around them, prisoners, soldiers, and staff dream of poisoning their tyrants, plotting their liberation between courses. The humour is dark, and the situations absurd, but the metaphor is clear: when power wants to control everything, including food, the act of cooking and sharing becomes a discreet weapon. French films like Partir un jour (Leave One Day) by Amélie Bonnin and La petite cuisine de Mehdi (Spices and Lies) by Amine Adjina explore another dimension of nourishment, memory, identity and generational friction. In one, a chef leaves Paris and returns to the family restaurant, confronted with the taste of childhood and a life she thought she had left behind. In the other, Mehdi, torn between his Algerian heritage and his love for French gastronomy, tries to protect his mother from his double life, piling up tender lies like poorly assembled dishes, until everything threatens to collapse.
Food here is never neutral. It carries class, culture, memory and sometimes a quiet form of social mobility. Every plate has a backstory.
In La cena by Manuel Gómez Pereira and Comandante Fritz by Pavel Giroud, the table is set in the shadow of dictatorships. Franco in Spain and Castro in Cuba appear as parodic, almost grotesque figures presiding over absurd banquets. Around them, prisoners, soldiers, and staff dream of poisoning their tyrants, plotting their liberation between courses. The humour is dark, and the situations absurd, but the metaphor is clear: when power wants to control everything, including food, the act of cooking and sharing becomes a discreet weapon. French films like Partir un jour (Leave One Day) by Amélie Bonnin and La petite cuisine de Mehdi (Spices and Lies) by Amine Adjina explore another dimension of nourishment, memory, identity and generational friction. In one, a chef leaves Paris and returns to the family restaurant, confronted with the taste of childhood and a life she thought she had left behind. In the other, Mehdi, torn between his Algerian heritage and his love for French gastronomy, tries to protect his mother from his double life, piling up tender lies like poorly assembled dishes, until everything threatens to collapse.
Food here is never neutral. It carries class, culture, memory and sometimes a quiet form of social mobility. Every plate has a backstory.
Humor, Humanity and the Complexity of Modern Life
Humor, Humanity and the Complexity of Modern Life. (c) MCFF Media Relations MONACO
Beyond the culinary thread, the line-up captures something essential about the contemporary human condition: the feeling of being constantly on edge, between humour and collapse.
In Homo Sapiens? by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, Argentina becomes a mirror for the world. Through sixteen satirical stories, all performed by Guillermo Francella, the film paints a gallery of characters marked by elegant opportunism, middle-class hypocrisy, exaggerated political correctness and the art of pretending not to know. There is no lesson, no redemption – only discomfort, tenderness and an irony that feels uncomfortably familiar. The title itself is a question: what kind of “sapiens” are we, exactly?
The Last Viking by Anders Thomas Jensen brings a darker, Nordic tone: two brothers, one recently released from prison, return to the landscape of their childhood in search of a long-buried loot. What begins as a quest for money becomes a confrontation with buried traumas and unresolved ghosts. With action, black humour and melancholy, the film reminds us that laughter and pain often coexist in the same frame. In Come ti muovi, sbagli (Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t) by Gianni Di Gregorio, comedy settles into the cracks of everyday life. A retired professor in his seventies sees his carefully organised solitude shattered when his daughter arrives with her children and marital problems. Around him, late love appears, fragile and stubborn. The humour is gentle, the situations recognisable, and through the chaos of family life, the film suggests something simple: connection is messy, but necessary.
Together, these films form something like a global portrait of human vulnerability. Different languages, different landscapes, but the same strange mixture of resilience, absurdity and desire to keep going.
In Homo Sapiens? by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, Argentina becomes a mirror for the world. Through sixteen satirical stories, all performed by Guillermo Francella, the film paints a gallery of characters marked by elegant opportunism, middle-class hypocrisy, exaggerated political correctness and the art of pretending not to know. There is no lesson, no redemption – only discomfort, tenderness and an irony that feels uncomfortably familiar. The title itself is a question: what kind of “sapiens” are we, exactly?
The Last Viking by Anders Thomas Jensen brings a darker, Nordic tone: two brothers, one recently released from prison, return to the landscape of their childhood in search of a long-buried loot. What begins as a quest for money becomes a confrontation with buried traumas and unresolved ghosts. With action, black humour and melancholy, the film reminds us that laughter and pain often coexist in the same frame. In Come ti muovi, sbagli (Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t) by Gianni Di Gregorio, comedy settles into the cracks of everyday life. A retired professor in his seventies sees his carefully organised solitude shattered when his daughter arrives with her children and marital problems. Around him, late love appears, fragile and stubborn. The humour is gentle, the situations recognisable, and through the chaos of family life, the film suggests something simple: connection is messy, but necessary.
Together, these films form something like a global portrait of human vulnerability. Different languages, different landscapes, but the same strange mixture of resilience, absurdity and desire to keep going.
Short Films, Big Questions
Short Films, Big Questions. (c) MCFF Media Relations MONACO
The festival also confirms its commitment to short forms with the Short Comedy Award, a section dedicated entirely to comic short films. Here, humour condenses into fifteen or twenty minutes, and the questions are no smaller: loneliness, the pressure to perform grief correctly, the thin border between tragedy and ridicule, the sudden reappearance of a will to live on a rooftop where someone thought their story had ended. Short films become laboratories where filmmakers, actors and writers experiment with tone and structure, often daring to take more risks than long features. Their presence at a high-profile event in Monaco gives them a much-needed space and visibility.
Comedy as a Way of Saying: “We’re Still Here”
Over the years, the Monte-Carlo Film Festival de la Comédie has moved far beyond the stereotype of a light, Riviera-flavoured event. It has become one of the most important international festivals dedicated exclusively to comedy, and it takes this role seriously.
By placing comedies at the centre – not in a side section, not as a guilty pleasure – the festival challenges an old hierarchy that often relegates humour to “minor” cinema. Here, comedy is allowed to be political, poetic, cruel, tender, and necessary. It is allowed to carry grief, war, inequality and fatigue, and still make a room full of people laugh together for ninety minutes.
In a time when brutality can feel louder than everything else, laughter is not a form of denial. It is a form of survival, a language that says: we see what is happening, and we refuse to be entirely crushed by it.
From the Grimaldi Forum, where screenings, masterclasses and the traditional gala evening unfolded, the 22nd edition sent out a message that had nothing frivolous about it: comedy is not the opposite of seriousness. It is another way of approaching it.
And perhaps that is the quiet strength of this festival. Year after year, from the Principality of Monaco, it reminds us that the most human stories are often told with a smile — sometimes bright, sometimes bitter, always revealing.
Long live comedy. Long live cinema. And long live the art of looking at our time with both clarity and humour, even when the world gives us every reason to do the opposite.
Comedy as a Way of Saying: “We’re Still Here”
Over the years, the Monte-Carlo Film Festival de la Comédie has moved far beyond the stereotype of a light, Riviera-flavoured event. It has become one of the most important international festivals dedicated exclusively to comedy, and it takes this role seriously.
By placing comedies at the centre – not in a side section, not as a guilty pleasure – the festival challenges an old hierarchy that often relegates humour to “minor” cinema. Here, comedy is allowed to be political, poetic, cruel, tender, and necessary. It is allowed to carry grief, war, inequality and fatigue, and still make a room full of people laugh together for ninety minutes.
In a time when brutality can feel louder than everything else, laughter is not a form of denial. It is a form of survival, a language that says: we see what is happening, and we refuse to be entirely crushed by it.
From the Grimaldi Forum, where screenings, masterclasses and the traditional gala evening unfolded, the 22nd edition sent out a message that had nothing frivolous about it: comedy is not the opposite of seriousness. It is another way of approaching it.
And perhaps that is the quiet strength of this festival. Year after year, from the Principality of Monaco, it reminds us that the most human stories are often told with a smile — sometimes bright, sometimes bitter, always revealing.
Long live comedy. Long live cinema. And long live the art of looking at our time with both clarity and humour, even when the world gives us every reason to do the opposite.