The Cannes Film Festival

Charlize Theron
Every year, for 12 days in May, the small city of Cannes in southern France turns into a meeting place for cinema’s players, would-be players and the people who report on them. If you don’t fall into any of these categories, your chances of attending a film screening at the festival are almost nonexistent, but you can gawk at the stars and bask in the atmosphere to your heart’s content.
Artistically, it’s an anything-goes film showcase that has launched the careers of directors like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh. It boasts such diverse events as black-tie screenings and midnight movies on the beach, and it has grown into a fairly intricate system of main events, sidebars and awards. In this article, you’ll find out what goes on during the Cannes Film Festival and why it is so unique.
The Cannes Experience

The Experience
This intense meeting of art, stardom and finance — Cannes is the number-one international market for first-time films, and multi-million dollar deals are signed there every year — attracts in the neighborhood of 27,000 film industry representatives and countless tourists. The perfect spring weather in Cannes doesn’t hurt, either.
Cannes Awards
There are two official juries at the Cannes Film Festival: the Feature Films Jury and the Short Films and Cinefondation Jury. Voting is by secret ballot, and majority rules. Members of the juries cannot have a film in competition.
Jury members are invited by the same selection committee that chooses the films. The official jurors are all people in the film industry, and more recently are almost exclusively directors or actors. It is an honor to be invited to sit on one of these juries — an even greater one to be jury president. The committee invites actors and directors it wants to recognize for great achievement. Jury members for the 2006 festival include the Chinese film director Wong Kar-Wai (serving as president), the Italian actress Monica Bellucci, the British actress Helena Bonham Carter, the British actor Tim Roth and the American actor Samuel L. Jackson.

Palme d'Or
The Camera d’Or is awarded by a separate jury to the best first-time film in the entire festival, including all sections of the Official Selection, the Directors’ Fortnight and International Critics’ Week. By Cannes standards, a “first-time film” is at least an hour long and its director has never before made a movie of that length for the cinema or TV.
One of the coolest things about the awards at Cannes is that they can be a little bit different every year. Juries have the freedom to add awards as they see fit, depending on the movies in the Official Selection that year. In 2000, “La Noce” by Pavel Lounguine won an award for the best ensemble of actors; in 1998, “Velvet Goldmine” by Todd Haynes was awarded the Prix de la meilleure contribution artistique au Festival International du Film — the prize for the greatest artistic contribution to the Festival. In 1991, Samuel L. Jackson won a best supporting actor award for his role in Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” — the first supporting actor award presented at the Cannes Film Festival. To view the entire archive of Cannes Film Festival awards, visit the official Web site.
While it is an extremely big deal to win an award at Cannes, there are other prizes to be had too. The screenings themselves are a major aspect of the festival, a place for new films, new artists and new artistic approaches to be seen by the people who matter in the film world. The Marche du Film at Cannes is the biggest international film market, and whether or not a movie wins the Palme d’Or, it has the chance of attracting the attention of critics and producers who can launch careers in the movie industry. Especially for an “indie” film, an invitation to Cannes can be a huge boost, and a win usually means serious dollars from producers who want to get in on the next big thing.

