The festival is coming to an end and I am now the last person from the Göteborg Film Festival left in Cannes. Feels a little empty, but luckily there are still tons of other people in town. A lot of them have been at the beach today since the weather has been amazing. An unhealthy red color is spreading like a virus on the skin of pale festival goers finally having the time to be in the sun now that the screening schedule is no longer too intense.
I arrived this Monday so unlike most others I am not fed up with Cannes. But I am exhausted after having traveled around the world in a large number of films and having invested myself in all kinds of destinies. Luckily the films of today have been good company. People are complaining about the general quality of the competition program. As a Dane it is fun to read the local newspaper headlines having critics complain about Lars von Trier not being in Cannes to give people something to talk about. I have been mostly watching films in the parallel section Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, so I can’t really join the critical choir regarding the competition. And this morning’s Quinzaine-screening of Fabienne Berthaud’s Pieds nus ser les limaces was a treat. Great to see women filmmakers tell stories worth telling with both drama and humor and not the least two great actresses, Ludivine Sagnier and Diane Kruger, in wonderful performances. It would be nice with more female voices in the program here, but they have had a hard time finding their way into the festival program this year. You can find links to some of the people complaining about that here: http://wellywoodwoman.blogspot.com/2010/05/cannes-for-women.html.
I haven’t seen any of the ’You Cannes Not Be Serious’-protest t-shirts around, though …
As pure pleasure on this last day at the festival, I will go to Cinéma de la plage and watch Le Monde du Silence by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle from 1956 by the sea tonight. Some friends have established a tradition of celebrating the last night with cinema on the beach, oysters and champagne. It seems stupid not to join in. Spoiled as it might sound, this is not what most of one’s time in Cannes is like running from screening to screening and waiting in line after line.
I would love to show you all photos from the screening under the stars, but since I have the oldest cell phone in town – thus often being ridiculed at a place with more iPhones per square meter than most other – I have no camera to annoy people with during the screening. So I’ll be signing off now, leaving you all on your own to guess who will be the winner of the palme d’or. The Danish documentary Armadillo has already been announced as the winner of the Semaine de la Critique, causing quite a stir in the Scandinavian circles. It seems unlikely that the competition winner will be hot news like that …
Eva Novrup Redvall
Göteborg International Film Festival 