Vanity Fair France Apologizes After Guy Pearce’s Palestinian Flag Pin Edited Out of Cannes Portrait: We ‘Mistakenly Published a Modified Photo’
Vanity Fair France has apologized for publishing a photo in which a Palestine pin that Guy Pearce was wearing on his suit was edited out (via CNN). Pearce attended this year’s Cannes Film Festival for David Cronenberg’s competition entry “The Shrouds,” in which he stars opposite Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger. Pearce was one of many festival stars to have his portrait taken and published by Vanity Fair France, but the photo online did not include the Palestinian flag pin the actor wore throughout the festival.
As reported by CNN: “A small Palestinian flag pin, which Pearce had been wearing on his lapel throughout Cannes, was missing from the photograph [on the publication’s website], though a different photo, featuring the pin, was posted to the magazine’s Instagram the same day the article published. A white, red, black and green bracelet — the colors of the Palestinian flag — was still visible on his wrist.”
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In a statement posted to social media, Vanity Fair France wrote: “We have mistakenly published a modified version of this photo on the site. The original version was posted on Instagram the same day. We have rectified our mistake and we apologize.”
Pearce was one of several actors who showed visible support for Palestine during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Variety reported as the festival got underway that Cannes was initially amenable to a plan for Arab filmmakers to wear pins showing support for the Palestinians under siege in Gaza, but it changed course and did not take part in the distribution of them, nor for the pins that pay homage to the more than 100 remaining Israeli hostages who were kidnapped by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack.
“This year we decided to host a festival without polemics, to make sure that the main interest for us all to be here is cinema, so if there are other polemics it doesn’t concern us,” festival chief Thierry Frémaux said at a press conference on the eve of opening night festivities.
Variety also reported that WestEnd Films co-founder Sharon Harel-Cohen organized a screening of “Bearing Witness” in Cannes as the festival was going on but had to cancel it amid a “serious security risk.” The 47-minute film shows raw footage from the Oct. 7 terror attack in southern Israel, some of it captured by body cameras and CCTV.
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