6:59 a.m. on a warm morning in Cannes, France. I stare hard at my laptop screen. More precisely: up the face of Mads Mikkelsen. In a few days, the Fantastic Beasts star will take part in a panel discussion in one of the festival cinemas and answer questions about his fascinating acting career. The kind of event you dream of when you attend exclusive accesses in Cannes thinks. In exactly one minute I can finally book the tickets for it.
The event is called “Rendez-vous with Mads Mikkelsen”. As the clock jumps to 7, I refresh the page. hold your breath But the booking button is greyed out. In less than a second, all the seats in the hall are gone. Or were never bookable for me. The same thing happens a day later with Dune actor Javier Bardem. I’m disappointed but not surprised. Because if you thought, as I did, that prestigious festivals meant seeing film industry icons off the big screen, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Instagram photos and wild party stories give the wrong impression of film festivals
The Cannes Film Festival is maybe that most glamorous film festival in the world – but only for the people who are already glamorous anyway. For the majority of those in attendance, Cannes is a never-ending process of booking press screening tickets, in very long queues in front of cinema halls and press conferences standing in line, watching films, hastily typing texts into the laptop you take with you everywhere and longing for the window of time when there is free wine and beer on the roof terrace and you can feel like an important person for a moment with the panoramic view over the marina.
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become a media worker classified into different groups by means of differently colored identification cards, according to which admission to events and the distribution in the cinema halls themselves are based on: white and pink with a yellow dot are important, pink (the accreditation we received for Moviepilot) is the journalism middle class, blue and yellow have in things Tickets are often left behind. Only selected journalists are very lucky and have extensive contacts the chance of premiere tickets, party invitations and interviews with the really important stars.
Ironically, Tom Cruise is the most accessible star in Cannes
The really big Hollywood icons who populate Cannes during the festival and stride across the red carpet? You usually only see them at a press conference, after which they are immediately herded into the next elevator by security people to disappear never to be seen again. Even the red carpet is barely visible from the festival site. Like the rest of the world, I find out that Julia Roberts, Jon Hamm and Sharon Stone are there via Instagram.
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only that Rendezvous with Tom Cruise takes place in one of the largest cinema halls – which means that even people like me can book tickets. And is thus the one big star moment of the festival, which can also feel special for the non-chosen ones. For more than an hour and a half, media representatives stand in line in the sweltering midday heat to be able to breathe the same air as Tom Cruise and to convey the impression via Insta-Stories that one is here in Cannes is very close to the Hollywood greats. We too – but you have to take a tiny bit of glamor and exclusivity with you.
Because otherwise the stars at film festivals keep to themselves while we look around in the basement of the building filled baguettes for 8 euros beat By the way, this isn’t a complaint, it’s a reality check. Because party reporting and social media had given me a completely wrong picture of film festivals. So forget glitz, glamor and lavish parties. The real privilege in Cannes remains seeing films that no one else gets to see. And that’s actually pretty great.
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Are you also interested in stars at festivals – or only in the films shown?