Festival de Cannes 2009

And now for the post we've all been waiting for…

Ladies and Gentleman, le Festival de Cannes 2009!

 

In a wonderful confluence of events, I made it to the last few days of the Cannes Film Festival last weekend.  Cannes itself is a gorgeous seaside town in the south of France with (as I learned) a few islands close by.  My first day there I went to the Ile de Sainte Marguerite where the man in the iron mask was imprisoned.  I got into the prison itself and adjacent museum for free because it was the very end of the day (my friends and I had taken the last boat of the day to get to the island).  It’s nothing too impressive to look at these days, just a couple of empty seaside prison cells, but it was pretty cool to walk around nonetheless.

There it is, the 40 year home to the man in the iron mask:

An iron mask is no good, but if you've gotta be in prison, at least this one has a nice view.

The next day we went to the Cannes Cinephile building to pick up our badges for the festival.  If you’re a film student or a member of a film fan club it’s pretty easy to get an accreditation to get into the festival, you just send proof of film student/fan status and a letter explaining why it would be super duper cool if you got to go to the festival and why movies are way awesome.  However, what this means is that, if accepted, you get a badge which permits you to get passes which MAY let you get into the films of the festival.   And those passes are not guaranteed, you have to go to the Cinephile building each morning and see which passes are available for the day, then you get to choose one or two and show up to the screening an hour ahead of time (depending on the film) to wait in line with the other students and non-professionals and hope you can get into the film.  However, we did not know this when we tried to see our first “Official Selection” film.  We got dressed up and arrived 15 minutes before hand only to be told that the tickets we thought we had were not actually tickets, they were more like “potential tickets” and there was no more room left in the screening for us, it was full.  We went to dinner, bummed, but showed up extra early at the next screening, determined not to be defeated a second time.  This film was Bad Boys of Cell 425 and was not a part of the official selection in competition; it was a part of a selection of 15 films which represent the festival's attempt to diversify its selection.  Once again, we did not know this. This meant, also, that we didn’t need to be there an hour ahead of time.  After asking everyone and their mother what time people usually line up, we got there a half an hour before the film was scheduled to start and we were the first ones in line.  Victory!

 

...sort of. 

 

We were also the only ones in line for a while.

 

 Bad Boys of Cell 425 wasn’t a bad film at all, but it was a very rough verité-inspired documentary about 7 men who share a single cell in a Polish Prison.  The filmmaker was a Polish man who hung out in a Polish prison cell for a week with a camera, interviewed the prisoners, and filmed what happened.  I gave the title in English, but the film itself was in Polish with French subtitles.  Luckily, I’ve been studying French for the last 4 months, so I could follow the film.  However, it was still quite a cultural experience, I felt bad for my non-film major friends.  Especially since the filmmaker used shots that expressed the limited space of the cell so watching was uncomfortable.  But it was a very interesting subject because the film delves into the lives of individual prisoners, their likes, dislikes, and how they get through each day.  They seem like pretty nice guys for the first three quarters of the movie.  Then they start talking about their crimes and you remember why they’re in prison and stop empathizing as much; it was a clever story-telling technique, one I liked a lot.

 

And because we only made it to the end of the festival, this was the only feature-length film we saw. However, the next day we went to screening of all the short films in competition, which was wonderful, the selection was excellent.  They were beautiful, touching, wonderful, and bizarre; aaand a great consolation prize for not seeing more features.  For more info.

The short film directors:

 

The theater:

That was my little excursion to the Cannes Film Festival.  No, I didn’t see any celebrities.  A lot of people who looked really familiar, the sorts of character actors you know you’ve probably seen 100 times but you have no idea who they are, but no real celebrities.  

I did however see a pretty good Brad Pitt impersonator.