Some film critics mentally prepare before plunging into the Cannes film festival and its 11 days of cinematic revelry. I certainly do. The night before I arrived on the Croisette, I went to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at the Filmothèque on Paris’s Left Bank, just to remind myself of certain standards films should be judged by: precision, ingeniousness, control, tension, humanity, audacity, elegance, and courage. Other years, I simply pick a film in Cannes Classics to start my film marathon. This festival sidebar shows a dozen beautifully restored masterpieces in my favourite screening rooms of the Luis Buñuel theatre. One way to clean the palate before the orgy begins. For it is easy to lose the plot in Cannes, and critics are particularly susceptible to losing their bearings after only a few days. Too little sleep, erratic eating and an overload of images, sound, fury and raw emotions thrown at them from dawn to night can affect both their gut instinct and thinking. A classic will get you geared up with your heart and brain in the right place, and allow you to distinguish between grace and pose, and tell the genuine article from the fraud.

Having viewed almost 3,000 films from 156 different countries, head honcho Thierry Frémaux and his selection committee have this year selected 22 titles in competition (and another 52 in other sections of the festival). This crop of films holds a mirror to the world. And it is not a pretty view. Whether it is some countries’ nightmarish past or tyrannical present, whether it is conflicting relationships within the family, between siblings, lovers and generations, film directors, young and old, do not pull their punches. The result, however, is not always effective or successful. Anger can sometimes lead to grotesque outcomes, such as in French filmmaker Julie Ducournau’s Alpha.

Ducournau returns four years after winning the Palme d’Or for her second feature Titane, a story of brain implant, mutilation and erotic car shows. Few understood at the time why the President of the Jury, Spike Lee, chose Titane but the award propelled Ducournau to the celebrated status of auteur overnight. Having watched Chainsaw Massacre at the age of six, Ducournau understandably never recovered, and her cinema is full body-horror. Alpha is in the same vein. It opens on a close-up of a needle repeatedly piercing the skin of a 13-year-old girl called Alpha. Taking place sometime in the 1980s, it is the story, but we are not quite sure, of how Alpha gets infected with a virus that turns people into marble and of her mother, a doctor, trying to save them. Her uncle, a drug addict, is played by Tahar Rahim who lost 20 kilos for the part and must now be regretting it. There is blood and rage, and characters either shout, tremble or weep uncontrollably for 130 minutes. But what for? We will never know nor care. Every year Cannes gives the world one magnificent turkey, and a few counterfeits. Alpha qualifies as both.

However, Cannes also reveals to the world the most powerful and complex films of the year, of the kind that simply elevate the soul. The Iranian film director Jafar Panahi, back in Cannes after seven years spent in and out of prison in Tehran and two hunger strikes, has been allowed by Iran’s Mullahs to present his film. He is among the very few internationally known Iranian film directors critical of the regime who still lives in Tehran and suffers the consequences for his art. No doubt he will pay a hefty price for his courage when he returns home. As always, with little means and non-professional actors, Jafar Panahi delivers a black comedy of profound humanity called A Simple Accident. A car accident and the death of an errant dog on the road sets a chain reaction à la Buster Keaton, except this is Iran today, and the film talks about state violence and its repercussions on society as a whole. How can ordinary citizens, imprisoned and tortured for no reason, continue to live among their tormentors? And if, as is the case here, coincidence allows them to kidnap one of their torturers, would they wish to kill them in revenge? Bad and evil is the topic of this giant of a minimalist film. After the long ovation that followed the screening, Jafar Panahi spoke to dedicate his film to all those, especially women, who are fighting for freedom and are rotting in Iranian jails. And the fact that he may join them on his return is horrifying.

Other film directors carry with them the fight for freedom and democracy. The Swedish-born Tarik Saleh’s Eagles of the Republic, the third instalment in his Cairo trilogy, focuses on Egypt’s corrupt regime. In the film, the Egyptian state crushes its citizens into submission when it doesn’t simply ‘disappear’ them, throwing them from planes into the desert. The film begins as a comedy when George Fahmy, an aging star, the ‘pharaoh of the screen’ (played by the charismatic Swedish-Lebanese actor Fares Fares) is pressured into playing Egyptian president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi in a biopic produced by the regime. In private, George, a rather vain womaniser, is critical of the regime, but when his family is threatened, he becomes compliant. Soon enough the satire turns sombre. Lack of conviction serves dictatorships which thrive on human frailty, if not plain cowardice. George is kind but fundamentally weak.

For some cinéastes, to film is to resist and to bear witness. In Cannes, their voice will keep on echoing long after they are silenced.