Posted at 8:00 a.m.
It begins badly…
Arrived early Monday morning near the Palais des Festivals to pick up my accreditation, I queued for about half an hour with people who were excited and in good spirits. It was going well, then came my turn. I go to the counter and I hand my French identity card to the clerk, telling myself that it will be easier and that it will go faster… All of a sudden, everything stops. Major failure of the computer system, more precisely of the internet server. While I had been there for an hour and a half, we were told to come back later. When I returned five hours later, service was still not restored. Some 400 people lined up in a bad mood. I wondered for half a second if it wasn’t my fault. “You have brought us bad luck from across the Atlantic! “, joked an employee of the press service. I finally got my accreditation, at the end of the afternoon, after an additional 45 minutes of waiting. This time, I didn’t take any risks: I showed my health insurance card. That’ll teach me to do my French.
Ukraine in the lead
PHOTO TOBIAS SCHWARZ, FRANCE-PRESSE AGENCY
Russian filmmaker and dissident Kirill Serebrennikov
The Cannes Film Festival officially opens this Tuesday with a zombie film whose title was until recently Z (like Z). The letter Z having been recovered by the supporters of Vladimir Putin, the French director Michel Hazanavicius preferred to rename his film Cut! The tragedy that is brewing in Ukraine will no doubt fuel many conversations during the Festival. Delegate General Thierry Frémaux spoke Monday at a press conference about the delicate exercise of supporting Ukraine without making Russian artists pay the price. Some were outraged that there was a place in competition for Russian dissident filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, who left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, but whose film Tchaikovsky’s wife is partly financed by the oligarch Roman Abramovich. While the most recent film by the most famous of Ukrainian filmmakers, Sergei Loznitsa (The Natural History of Destruction), is presented in a “special session”, just like the latest film by his late compatriot Mantas Kvedaravicius (Mariupolis 2), assassinated by the Russian army. The Un Certain Regard section also presents a work by Maksim Nakonechnyi. “I receive very violent emails”, confided Thierry Frémaux, reiterating the position of the festival, which is to ban any official Russian representation, but not its dissident artists.
A helmet on the Croisette
PHOTO VIANNEY LE CAER, ASSOCIATED PRESS
There is a gigantic fighter pilot’s helmet on the Croisette, just in front of the Carlton.
There is a gigantic fighter pilot’s helmet on the Croisette, just in front of the Carlton. More than two meters in height. Another sign of the imminent arrival of Tom Cruise in Cannes and the sequel to Top Gun, which will be presented out of competition in the middle of the week. “ Top Gun Where Elvis could have been in competition, “said Thierry Frémaux at a press conference on Monday. “Tom Cruise is one of the actors with the highest success rate,” he added, specifying that the American “devotes himself entirely to cinema” to the detriment of TV series, commercials, etc. “To see it, you have to see it in a cinema! Vincent Lindon, whom we met earlier in the day, also campaigns for the decompartmentalization of cinematographic genres (as we have seen in Titanium, Palme d’or last year). “I like to act in social films”, says the one who won the Interpretation Prize at Cannes in 2015 for his role as an unemployed person in The law of the market by Stéphane Brizé. “But I would also like to be in Top Gun ! »