How has a year gone by already?! It’s May. The sun is out. The Mediterranean is… just over there. It’s the Cannes Film Festival, and I’m over here reporting for Take One again. Blooming fantastique!
Last year, I took a train from St Pancras and journeyed through the French countryside on a TGV, right into the heart of Cannes. I couldn’t justify the expense this year, so I flew from Stansted to Nice, in a much more affordable price bracket. I was joined on my journey by my friend Sarah McIntosh, the Cambridge Film Festival Submissions Coordinator and Shorts Programmer. It’s fine travelling on your own, but it’s twice as fun with a friend. The flight and subsequent bus journey from Nice to Cannes allowed us to compare notes on our previous festival experiences. I guess two years in a row for me, and three for Sarah, makes us very junior veterans of the festival?
In the baggage reclaim area of Nice airport, we bumped into Deborah Allison, the programmer for Cinema City – the Arts Picturehouse’s sister cinema in Norwich. As part of the programming team for Picturehouse Cinemas here at the festival, Sarah and I were both amazed at how efficient Deborah’s visit to the festival is compared to ours. She has her marketplace screenings all scheduled out for her in a little coloured-coded book. If she has judged the tone of a film within the first thirty minutes and has another film to catch, she is expected to up and leave to the next screening. She’ll see parts of lots more films than Sarah or I will – it is refreshing to gain some perspective on one’s festival experience in comparison to others.
I have Industry accreditation for the festival, which in short means I can get into all the screenings of films outside the marketplace, but I have to queue. This I do not mind as you always bump into interesting people in queues. It must change the pace of the festival, having to flit from screening to screening at such a pace. I have great respect for all in the Picturehouse Cinemas programming team whose work schedule at Cannes is at Autobahn in comparison to my A-Road speed!
That’s the energy in the air …
A couple of Cambridge Film Festival friends are heading over to the apartment tomorrow, to stay for the weekend. CFF Festival Director, Tony Jones, is heading out on Friday afternoon to meet us for the remainder of Cannes. For now, this evening it’s just Sarah and me. We have to be in nice and early tomorrow morning for our first film of the festival, Elie Wajerman’s LES ANARCHISTES, and we’ll be queuing from about 7.00am we think. Earlier today on the promenade, Sarah heard the Star Wars theme tune, so we retraced our steps looking for the source. After all, this being Cannes, could there be some surprise Star Wars event? Well… no, there wasn’t. But there’s always the chance that something of that nature could be just around the corner. That’s the energy in the air. The excitement that everyone feels when they touch down after a stressful week at work and realise that they’re stepping into something rather special.
I’m here for the duration this year – so peeved was I at missing out on the world premiere of MOMMY, LOST RIVER and PRIDE last year, that when the opportunity arose to stay for ten whole days in the South of France, I leapt at it. There’ll be film reviews, interviews with interesting folk, an attempt at reviewing the cinemas I visit, and of course, a daily blog, all to appear here on the Take One website in the coming days. I hope you enjoy reading through my insights into what’s happening here in one of the world’s finest film festivals!
httpvh://youtu.be/j3n4iZdGNbc