★ Cannes Film Festival

01Pourquoi c'est important

No other festival combines a competition of this standing with a market of this size. A Palme d'Or reorders a director's career and a film's distribution in fifty countries at once; a Marché screening at eight in the morning decides whether a film gets made at all. The selection is the year's most closely watched act of editorial judgment in cinema, and the reaction inside the Lumière — the length of the standing ovation, reported to the minute by the trade press — has become a metric in its own right.

In our reading, Cannes matters to the wider calendar for a second reason that has little to do with film. It is the moment the Riviera season begins. Brands, watch houses and drinks companies stage their first large Mediterranean programs of the year here, charter yachts fill the bay off the Croisette, and Monaco's Grand Prix follows within a fortnight. For a great many people who travel through the south of France in summer, the second half of May is simply when the coast switches on, and Cannes is the switch.

02La semaine environnante

Cannes in festival fortnight is a town given over to one activity. The Croisette's seaward side fills with temporary brand pavilions and beach-club takeovers; the landward side is fenced for the red carpet, and crossing the boulevard near the Palais can take twenty minutes in the early evening. Traffic on the Boulevard de la Croisette is restricted around gala times, the Rue d'Antibes behind it becomes the working shortcut, and the bay fills with chartered yachts, some serving as floating offices for sales companies. The Vieux Port is closed to casual mooring for the duration.

The surrounding program is dense and much of it is public. Cinéma de la Plage's nightly open-air screenings on the beach are free and take a real local audience; Cannes Cinéphiles gives residents and film-society members access to Official Selection titles in cinemas around town; and the Marché's International Village of national pavilions, though badge-only inside, animates the whole seafront. Antibes, Juan-les-Pins, Mougins and Cap d'Antibes absorb the overflow, and a number of the fortnight's better-known evening events happen outside Cannes altogether, at Cap d'Antibes and along the coast toward Nice.

03Quand arriver

For the market, the first Wednesday through the second Monday is the working core; deals move in the first five days and the Palais thins noticeably after the middle weekend. For the Official Selection, the opening Tuesday and the first weekend carry the largest premieres, and the second weekend belongs to awards and repeat screenings. Arriving on the Monday before opening is the difference between a functioning first day and a lost one, because badge collection, apartment keys and the Nice airport transfer all take longer than expected. Departing on the second Sunday, after the Saturday closing ceremony and the Sunday replay of the prize winners, avoids the worst of the outbound crush at Nice.

04Où séjourner

The Croisette hotels put you within walking distance of every screening and every queue, and they price accordingly: the Carlton, the Martinez and the Majestic are the landmarks the industry uses as meeting points, and the Palais is at most a fifteen-minute walk from any of them. Behind the Croisette, the streets around the Rue d'Antibes and the Rue Hoche hold smaller hotels and the great majority of the short-term apartments the festival runs on; the trade-off is noise and a long climb of stairs rather than distance. Le Suquet, the old town on the hill above the port, is quieter and has the better casual restaurants. Many attendees never sleep in Cannes at all, taking rooms in Antibes, Juan-les-Pins, Mougins, Le Cannet or Nice and commuting by train or car; the coastal railway is the reason this works. Cap d'Antibes, twenty minutes west, holds the coast's best-known grand hotels and is where much of the fortnight's off-site programming happens.

05Accès et hospitalité

The festival is accredited rather than ticketed, and it publishes the rules plainly. Applications open in the winter through the festival's own portal and are assessed by category: press, film industry professional, Marché du Film participant, festival programmer, and cinephile. Badges are personal, color-coded, and set queue priority for screenings; there is no publicly purchasable pass to the Official Selection and none should be bought from resellers. Two published routes exist for people without professional standing. Cannes Cinéphiles, run with the city, allocates Official Selection seats to members of local film associations and to residents. Trois Jours à Cannes is a free pass for applicants aged 18 to 28, applied for online in the spring, giving access to Official Selection screenings over the festival's final three days. The Marché du Film sells its own accreditation to companies. Cinéma de la Plage requires no badge at all: free tickets for the beach screenings are distributed in advance and a standing area takes anyone who turns up.

06Où se déroule l'activité sociale

The public geography is a single boulevard. The Croisette from the Palais east to the Martinez is the promenade everyone walks several times a day, and the hotel terraces along it — the Carlton's, the Majestic's, the Martinez's — function as the festival's open-air offices from breakfast until late. The Pantiero and the Vieux Port hold the pavilion village and the queue for the market. Behind them, the Rue d'Antibes carries the shops and the everyday cafés, and Le Suquet's stepped lanes hold the restaurants people retreat to when they have stopped working. The beach clubs along the Croisette are taken over in rotation by companies and brands during the fortnight and their access varies by day; several open to walk-in customers outside their event hours. Along the coast, Antibes and Juan-les-Pins take the late crowd, and the pebble beaches west of the Palais are where the town's own residents go to avoid all of it.

07Comment s'y rendre

08Informations pratiques

09Historique

The festival was conceived in the late 1930s as a French answer to the Venice Mostra, which had come under Fascist political influence; Louis Lumière agreed to preside over an inaugural edition set for September 1939, and it was abandoned when Germany invaded Poland. The first festival ran in 1946 with twenty-one countries taking part, in a temporary hall while the first Palais was built. The top prize was called the Grand Prix until 1955, when the Palme d'Or was introduced.

Three changes made the modern festival. The Marché du Film in 1959 turned an artistic showcase into the industry's annual clearing house. The events of May 1968 stopped the festival mid-course when directors including Truffaut and Godard occupied the hall in solidarity with the general strike, and the Directors' Fortnight was founded the following year as a deliberately independent counterweight. And the present Palais, opened in 1982 and known locally as the bunker, gave the festival the capacity to hold both halves of itself under one roof. The 2020 edition was cancelled because of the pandemic, the first interruption since 1968.

10Qui s'y trouve

Directors, actors and their agents and publicists; sales companies, distributors, financiers and streaming executives at the Marché; several thousand accredited journalists and critics; festival programmers scouting the year's circuit; brand and sponsor delegations; and a large public audience of residents and day visitors who come for the beach screenings and the barriers. The Marché side of the festival is the largest single group and the least visible in photographs.