There is a trick to this festival. If you stand still long enough in Cannes — something a bit difficult to do on a weekend as crowds are bustling all around you — you’ll run into everyone who is anyone in the film universe.
It has been a long week, and it’s only been five days for me, at the Festival de Cannes. But this has turned out to be one of the best festivals, because for a journalist attending the grandest film event in the world (a tie with Venice of course!) access is everything. I’ve managed some great seats for all the films I came into the festival wanting to watch and, by the time I leave, I’ll have interviewed some auteurs that I can tick off my list of must-meet. All in all, that’s success in my book.
Were there glitches? Well, nothing too serious. On Saturday there was a bomb scare and everyone had to stand still for a few minutes, which is always a good thing in Cannes. You run into people you know and catch up with old friends you didn’t know were on the Croisette. And you can have ice cream nearby, if you’re not told by the French police and the army in full camouflage, to stay right where you are, as they do their jobs with the calculated precision that is needed.
There have also been a few parties, and as a voting member of the Golden Globes, I have been privy to some good ones. It’s a perk of the “job” which, come crunch time in late December and early January, involves a lot of movie watching. Good thing about festivals is that you get to prepare for that work, by watching what you believe could be nominated on the ground here. And that saves work during crunch time, of course.
Taiwanese filmmaker KEFF at the Semaine de la Critique beach
So, great films that I believe we will be seeing nominated for the next award season are Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, starring Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito, Andrea Arnold’s Bird, starring Barry Keoghan, and Magnus van Horn's The Girl with the Needle, starring Vic Carmen Sonne and Trine Dyrholm in a tour de force which packs a punch. But also films screening in the sidebars including the Zambian title in Un Certain Regard, Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, the first Taiwanese film featured in the Semaine de la Critique — Locust by KEFF, who is a filmmaker that should be on everyone’s radar. And Everybody Loves Touda by French-Moroccan auteur Nabil Ayouch, whom I got to interview for what will be a deeply personal piece, to come.
Of course, the views expressed above are my own, and not those of the Golden Globes.
What about the parties, you ask? Well, my favorite get-together each year in Cannes is the one organized by the Doha Film Institute, on the roof of the Five Seas Hotel. It’s like a reunion of great film people you crave to see and once a year, magically, they come together in this idyllic location, overlooking the Cannes rooftops. From world class film editor Sebastian Sepulveda, to filmmaker extraordinaire and artistic advisor to the Institute Elia Suleiman, to the fab coordinators who put the Qumra mentorship program together, Nina Rodriguez and Ali Khechen, and the leadership of the DFI Hanaa Issa and Fatma Hassan Al Remaihi, it’s a group so welcoming and so perfectly in love with cinema that it’s a joy to be among them.
There is also a sidebar at the festival called Cannes Premiere which is an almost secret jewel making for some super special evenings for this journo. The screenings take place inside the Salle Debussy, which was Jean-Luc Godard’s favorite room inside the Palais des Festivals. The legendary French Swiss filmmaker had it right of course, as the Debussy, named after the composer Claude Debussy, has perfect acoustics and great viewing from every seat.
Something about these evenings inside the Debussy, introduced by Cannes general delegate and heart of the festival Thierry Frémaux feels like one belongs to a secret society which meets once a day, around 7.30 each evening to share something very precious. Among the titles I’ve watched so far in the series are Everybody Loves Touda, but also Academy Award nominated Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh’s Rendez-Vous avec Pol Pot, starring Irène Jacob and Grégoire Colin, and Leos Carax’s wild ride into his inner workings C’est pas moi — which may end up with a live action short film Oscar nomination.
Denis Lavant and Baby Annette after the screening of ‘C’est pas moi’
One thing I confirmed about Carax, who was recently in Doha for their annual industry incubator Qumra and took orchestrated and strategically timed cigarette breaks during his masterclass — those cigarettes may be his lifeline, but they also are his “props”. He uses them as a sort of signature object, a part of his public persona that creates mystery and speculation around him. Which of course, makes him the perfect Cannes poster child, where filmmakers are chosen as much for their personal impact as they are for their films. The head of a film commission in the MENA region said it best: “In Venice, they pick films to screen; in Cannes they pick filmmakers who are bound to make an impression, and their films.”
I digressed from the parties a bit, because cinema is never far from my heart in Cannes. A photo of the Baby Annette, from the film, being held by Carax collaborator and cinematic alter ego Denis Lavant, made my evening, after the puppet, and her puppeteers re-enacted on screen the iconic running scene from Bad Blood, the 1986 Carax film, featuring the song ‘Modern Love’ by David Bowie. If one film exalts the power of music in cinema, that’s the one.
But back to the parties for the final thought. Cannes is not complete without a yacht party — I know, first world sentence right there. Docked in the old port, right behind the Palais des Festivals, the RH THREE was the elegant venue for our afternoon get-together celebrating the Golden Globes voting members, who hail from all over the world.
As we nibbled on caviar and champagne, yup not to shabby, and some rocking asparagus risotto, we also connected, reconnected and, more personally, realized what is really important. And just in case my mind had wondered from its purpose, on the way out we received little goodie bags of hazelnut filled chocolates, from Parisian chocolatiers Alléno & Rivoire. Because as Tom Hanks playing Forrest Gump famously uttered: “My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.”
In Cannes, you get it all, every flavor and all kinds.
Top image, courtesy of the Festival de Cannes, used with permission.