Vanessa Redgrave’s glorious film career kicked off in Cannes in 1966 when she won the best actress award for “Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment,” directed by Karel Reisz. She is at the fest as a director for the first time this year with “Sea Sorrow,” a meditation on the current global refugee crisis; it also marks her directorial debut and plays in the Cannes Special Screenings section. Redgrave, 80, spoke to Variety about what prompted her to get behind the camera. You’ve been a political activist for many years and campaigned widely for refugee rights, but what drove you to make a film about the current crisis? I hoped that anyone watching this film could take in the subject and think about refugees in a way that perhaps hadn’t been possible for them before, because of the way the media reports their plight. I don’t mean media reports issued by Doctors Without Borders in France, which are fantastic, or by Emergency [another non-governmental org] in Italy. They are extremely proactive and have never hesitated to speak their minds and come out very firmly against every violation of human rights. But with a few exceptions the media have been absolutely dreadful. They’ve turned the word “refugee” into a word of abuse, which is terrifying! A film can open hearts and minds that have been closed, for whatever reasons.

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