Yes, We Cannes
Experience the famous film festival’s resort town like an A-lister
IT’S A mild May morning in Cannes, at the midpoint of the world’s most celebrated film festival. Despite the early hour – 8am – La Croisette, the glamorous French resort’s beachside promenade, is far from empty. There’s a sprinkling of well-preserved (or welllifted) locals jogging in designer tracksuits or walking their Afghan hounds. But mostly the human fauna is made up of two migratory species. One is a shabby phalanx of film critics, hurrying towards the vast Grand Théâtre Lumière inside the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès for the 8.30am press screening of the day’s big competition film. The other, far less purposeful in their progress, are the partygoers. They went to a party last night where they met some people who dragged them to another party, where some other people somehow knew everyone about endedan afterparty;up at the then lateclosing Swedish Petit film Majestic distributor bar, mentionedwhere a a workers’ café not far away that opened at 6am where they could go on drinking. Now, at last, they’re heading home... if only they could remember where home was... and what happened to their shoes.
Like the elephant in the fable of the blind men, the Cannes film festival (festival-cannes.com) is an entirely different beast according to how you approach it. Many who come for the 12-day event never see a single film – they’re too busy partying, doing deals, babysitting celebrities and their kids or buying or selling films that wouldn’t make the official selection in a million years – films with titles like Attack of the Killer Donuts. Serious cinéastes mutter about the distractions of Cannes’ frivolous side, about the way commerce taints the sacred purity of, say, a threehour Romanian film about an old man dying (yes, like Attack of the Killer Donuts, this really exists). But the festival, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this May, knows that each of these strands needs the other. Cannes wouldn’t be the world’s leading film market if it weren’t for the kudos conferred by the art-house films in its official competition and sidebar sections. The stars wouldn’t turn up without the presence of the world’s media and vice versa. And without the glamour of the event – and the chance for the CEO to meet the latest Hollywood starlet on his yacht or at the beach party he’s funding – the festival and the industry wouldn’t attract the sponsors it needs to survive. This symbiosis has made Cannes the undisputed king of film festivals – so much so that it doesn’t even need the word “film” in its official name, Festival de Cannes.
The first festival, held in 1946, was a relatively low-key affair, a defiant show of normalcy in a France still hurting from the trauma of war and occupation. The budget was so limited that Cannes’ municipal gardeners were drafted in to make up for a shortfall in projectionists. Lack of government funding in those early years led to the wholesale cancellation of the 1948 and 1950 festivals. But Cannes built authority and media recognition and was soon challenging Europe’s oldest major film festival, Venice, for the top spot.
There have been hiccups along the way. The 1968 festival was shut down by a filmmakers’ collective, spearheaded by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, in solidarity with the students’ and workers’ protests that were sweeping France. And there were frequent tugs of war over films that governments didn’t want the rest of the world to see. One of Gilles Jacob’s first acts on being appointed festival director in September 1977 was to obtain a clandestine copy of dissident Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s latest film, Man of Marble, which was programmed at Cannes in 1978 as a “surprise screening”. The Cannes veteran repeated the trick two years later with Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, taking the precaution of locking the projection booth from the inside, in case the Soviet delegation tried to break in.
Such censorship battles are by no means a thing of the distant past: in 2011, the Cannes copy of Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film was smuggled out of Tehran – where the Iranian director was under house arrest – on a flash drive hidden inside a cake.
Still fighting fit as it turns 70, Cannes is the alpha and omega of film festivals. But it’s also, as anyone will tell you, one of the most difficult to navigate – especially for non-accredited visitors who are keen simply to see a few films, perhaps swing an invite to a beach party and soak up the atmosphere. The following nuggets are the result of 15 years’ hard-won experience.