Bono debuts AppleTV+ documentary at Cannes, criticizes US aid cuts

By Mike Davidson

CANNES, France (Reuters) -For Bono, the U2 frontman used to performing at sold-out arenas, being without his bandmates on a sparsely decorated stage for his one-man show, now subject of the new AppleTV+ documentary "Bono: Stories of Surrender," feels unfamiliar.

"You come from 250 Mack Trucks to a table and chairs. But that's the attraction of it for me," Bono told Reuters ahead of the documentary's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday.

The black-and-white film is based on Bono's memoir, "Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story" and accompanying tour, where the Irish rock star reflects on fatherhood, religion, death, politics and his band's some five decades of performing.

The documentary, which can be streamed from May 30, is the first feature-length film that can be watched in Apple Immersive Video with the company's Vision Pro wearable headset device.

"It's a story about fathers. It's my relationship with my actual father. It's my life as a father," he said.

"And then it's this relationship with my Father in heaven, whatever you want to call that force of love and logic behind the universe."

AID WORK

Bono, who has long campaigned for debt relief, aid and better trade for Africa, said that he thought of his father's voice when he looked back at the 1985 Live Aid charity concert for Ethiopian famine relief that was also pivotal to launching U2 into superstar territory.

"My father would say, 'If the world was just, you wouldn't need charity.' So we had to push through Live Aid," said the singer about the event organised by rockers Bob Geldof and Midge Ure that raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

Bono said that U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the world's richest man, are squandering the potential of millions of people by making huge cuts to U.S. foreign aid spending, "with glee it would appear".

It was unwise policy as well as "the definition of the absence of love," added the singer.

(Reporting by Mike DavidsonWriting by Miranda Murray and Frances Kerry)