I went to the Cannes Film Festival
There are three prestigious film festivals in the world and therefore three truly prestigious film awards: the Golden Lion is awarded at the Venice International Film Festival, the world’s oldest film festival, the Golden Bear is awarded at the Berlinale and the Palme d’Or, considered by many to be the most prestigious film award, is the top prize at the Cannes International Film Festival. Perhaps the most prestigious of the three, it has become a kind of mini-Hollywood in recent years, with world stars converging on the hotels and airspace of the seaside town. I deliberately didn’t write “on the streets of the seaside town” because then life would be paralysed if Johnny Depp were to step out of the hotel door on a weekday evening. So the world stars mostly travel between multi-star hotel rooms and private yachts by helicopter or luxury SUVs with blacked-out windows. I know this because I experienced it day after day during the second week of May, as I had the great honour of being accredited to the event as a Master’s student in film directing. It all started with the decision of the film festival’s management to offer students from most of Europe’s film universities a few tickets to the film festival. And so it began that, as a graduate student in Documentary Filmmaking at the University of Theatre and Film Arts, I and four of my classmates were able to take in the French Riviera.
After a quick Budapest-Nice flight and a seatless Nice-Cannes train journey, we arrived in Europe’s most crowded city – or at least that’s how we felt when we had to walk tens of kilos of luggage to our accommodation on the festival-filled roads. After settling into our accommodation close to the city centre, we set off to see what the next week had in store for us. We weren’t in for a big culture shock, but from the first moment we saw that this city was breathing with the festival, with everyone in suits, jackets and evening gowns walking along the pedestrianised, boardwalk parallel to the beach, near the festival palace. We felt like we were in the right place and couldn’t wait to get our accreditation card the next day and join the hustle and bustle.
Cannes is a very densely populated place, traffic was a mess, but no one was ever nervous on the roads, because the French Riviera’s sense of life never allows people to get upset. Crowds of people on the pavement, on the service road parallel to the closed beach and of course on the promenade. People dressed up in tuxedos, suits or rather evening gowns even during the day, as this is how they honour the screening of premiere films as well as those in competition. Every day there were two competition films at the premiere, and we had the opportunity to see French, Italian and American films. In one of the Italian films, “A Brighter Tomorrow”, Zsolt Anger was even present and spoke a few sentences in Hungarian. Unfortunately we couldn’t get into Wes Anderson’s latest film but there were still some films that surprised us in a positive way. For example, at quarter past one in the morning two films started two days in a row, one of them was a Bollywood film “Kennedy”, which supposedly starred the best Indian actors. This was in the large auditorium, which seats thousands and is not recommended for people with fear of heights because it is steep and like a stadium it can fit a lot of people. We were the first to go up on the red carpet (but only on the edge because the filmmakers went in the middle.) Once we took our seats, we could watch the filmmakers and actors walk in on the red carpet on the big screen live as they entered the hall to a loud ovation from everyone. The film was an action thriller and quite brutal, not for nothing it was screened as part of the Midnight Madness programme. Also on the same date but the following night was the screening of Robert Rodriguez’s latest rampage, “Hypnotize.” Unfortunately only Rodriguez was in the theater, star Ben Affleck was out of town. For me, the film was a strong medium, the basic idea was only half creative.
We saw student films, and the president of this competition was Ildikó Enyedi. We did not speak to her personally on the spot, but we saw her, but we did talk to Flora Anna Buda, the Hungarian winner of the Palme d’Or for short film, in the tent of the National Film Institute. We didn’t know she was going to win at the time, but we found out that her film was very personal, so we were immediately curious to see it. These tents were the tents of the film institutes of the different countries, where you could make valuable contacts if you were there at the right time.
There were also classic films, I watched the 1966 film “ES”. I was very surprised, because the Germans are not known for their French lightness, and this film brings the atmosphere of the French New Wave of the 1960s in a way that is unmistakably French, as if it were not a precise German film. I recommend this film to everyone.
To be fair, we did spend some time on the beach, not just in the cinema, as we were in Cannes for the first time and thought we had to experience everything. The list of experiences is endless; just to mention a few, such as the quirky themed beach party in the evening, collecting business cards at the official festival party, the icy Mediterranean sea, running into Vanda Schumacher and Viktoria Jasmine, the gigantic fireworks at the end of the festival, and the Monaco Grand Prix. On Saturday, I went to Monaco, an hour’s train ride away, to see what life is like in the city during the qualifying. I hadn’t bought a ticket, so I couldn’t go into the city any further, and then suddenly the gates were opened and it was free to go. Although the grandstands blocked my view, I managed to find a spot where the cars passed five metres away from me and watched Verstappen pass me on the start-finish straight through the glass of a panoramic terrace. It was a really great experience.
Back to Cannes, the last film I saw was Elemi, the closing film of the festival, the latest Pixar film. Pixar films are very deep, which is why I love them, but this was a big disappointment. It was boring and full of logical errors. I rushed out of the theatre immediately after the screening, then the next day I read that I missed five minutes of standing ovation, I didn’t understand the whole thing. I ended up with a bad film, but the week, the experience I spent there, will always be etched in my mind as a positive memory.
Vig Dávid, Jászság Group 2, SZFE Master of Documentary Filmmaking