Each year, the deconstruction of the enormous festival machine is as spectacular as it is rapid. A few hours are enough on Sunday morning to take down all the posters, pack up the red carpets, empty the rooms, return the Palais des Festivals to its bareness of a vast center dedicated to seminars and conferences.
Each year, the deconstruction of the enormous festival machine is as spectacular as it is rapid. A few hours are enough on Sunday morning to take down all the posters, pack up the red carpets, empty the rooms, return the Palais des Festivals to its bareness of a vast center dedicated to seminars and conferences.
Bye bye, Cannes Film Festival. End of a twelve-day cavalcade, which once again this year was at full speed. Dozens of daily screenings, around a hundred films from around the world revealed in preview, including 22 in competition, 40,000 accredited professionals, including 4,000 journalists, 200,000 entries into the screenings according to estimates which will be refined in the coming days. Beyond the figures, here is a first assessment in a few words.
#Me too. Paradox: there has been a lot of talk about #MeToo when in fact, no case has implicated a personality or one of the many guests of the festival. Rachida Dati and the CNC, Cinema Center, announced that from this summer, in all films benefiting from public aid, the presence of a “children manager” will now be compulsory, and the teams will have to in their entirety (technicians, actors, producers) follow training on sexual violence.
Faces. Avalanche of stars of course (Meryl StreepCate Blanchett, Richard Geré Catherine Deneuve, Demi Moore…) but we will also remember the new faces of this edition: Karim Leklou (“L’Amour ouf”, “Le Roman de Jim”), Margaret Qualley (“The Substance”, “Kinds of Kindness”), Laetitia Dosch ( “Le Roman de Jim”, “The Trial of the Dog”), Charlotte Le Bon (“Niki”).
Blood. Julia Ducourneau paved the way with “Titanium”, Palme d’Or 2021. The genre and horror film reinvents itself in a contemporary variant, the feminist gore film. Two examples this year: ” The substance ” by Frenchwoman Coralie Fargeat, with Demi Moore, and “Women on the Balcony” by Noémie Merlant. “The excessive side of gore allows us to talk about very serious things while completely playing down the drama,” explains Coralie Fargeat.
Veterans. They were the barons of this selection. Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg, Paul Schrader… But their new opuses have not really appealed. Can we be and have been? Not sure.
Box office. The programming is positioned each year in balance between cutting-edge cinema and blockbusters aiming for the top of the box office. We thus discovered “Mad Max Furiosa”, released on May 22, “Horizon”, a western by Kevin Costner (July 3 in theaters), “The Count of Monte Cristo” (which arrives on June 28), “L’Amour ouf” (November 16).
Juggernauts eagerly awaited by exhibitors, because theater attendance from January to April fell by 17% compared to 2023, due to a lack of an American locomotive, the releases of blockbusters having been delayed by the strike in Hollywood last year. Fortunately, Artus and the merry gang of “A little thing in more”who climbed the steps on Wednesday since the beginning of May, have been revitalizing attendance at the cinema.