The Cannes Film Festival - the Convergence of Cinema

Last summer I traveled to Cannes through the Creative Mind Group - the same organization that is sponsoring Ilya and Heliya's travels this semester.

http://thecreativemindgroup.com/

While most of my trip to Cannes was spent producing the 5 minute short film How to Have Ever https://vimeo.com/97507357 I spent a lot of time exploring the town of Cannes.

The Festival is, without exaggeration, one of Europe's most prestigious and anticipated events. That said, the screening schedule was primarily occupied by American films. Even "How to Train Your Dragon 2" made it to the Jury. Many other Jury films, such as the French "Two Days One Night" and British "Mr. Turner" starred actors well known to American audiences; Marion Cotillard and Timothy Spall (Peter Pettigrew in Harry Potter).

As an international event, the language spoken at the festival is English. To get by in the town of Cannes, French is helpful, but unnecessary. As a filmmaker scouting locations, a workable French vocabulary went a long way towards winning favor with the locals, but a tourist could go the entire Festival without a single bonjour and never realize he'd left the states.

The Cannes Film Festival, historically, has always been the haunt of America's biggest celebrities. However, the sheer infiltration of the highest cinematic honors at Cannes by American cinema remind us not just that the medium is dominated by American culture, but that European reception of American cinema is highly important to Hollywood. In an age where the most important market is the global one, festivals like Cannes accommodate not just the international marketing needs of the film industry, but the cultural exchange that allows for profitable and universally appealing narratives.

As a filmmaker then, it is incredibly important to visit the Cannes Film Festival and other festivals of its sort in Europe/Asia/Africa/South America. It not longer works to be ignorant of the cinema culture
of other countries. As influential as American films are, the most commercially successful ones take advantage of their knowledge of foreign markets.