Cannes 2026: First Days
Exiting a week of stress, making appointments for my clients, Uber not arriving to take me to the Gare de Lyons in Paris where I was to take the train to Cannes (ordered another), losing my keys...
I arrived — a day earlier than I was expected— at my place at 9 rue Hoche in Cannes. But the Cafe Casablanca across the way where I usually pick up my keys was closed and only by luck did I find someone to help call the owner and access my key. After unpacking, I went to meet my dinner mates at La Pizza —where else? — at 7 and found out it was only 5…my cel tel showed 17:00 and I did not see the 1!! So I walked along the Quai St. Pierre down past the former Radisson (now the Hilton), saw the sea, bathers in the sea, people walking along that promenade, pretty flowers, palm trees, a ridiculously huge cruise ship out at sea, a boy having a temper tantrum, a bus whose driver I asked (all in French!) about getting passage with my card which was not valid in Cannes, only in Nice…
I went to the top of the Hilton (former Radisson) for a glass of Rosé which turned into two and with a nice buzz, went down to meet my friends at 7:30.
As I waited for them, saw two old friends Gary Phillips of Moviehouse and the Canadian distributor Paul Gardner and talked about old times and new…
Gary’s older brother Greg Phillips took me in 1975 to dinner in Amsterdam when I was training as the first woman in international distribution at 20th Century Fox International there. We went to a reistafel * restaurant on Leidseplein and stole a napkin from there…my first time learning “sanctioned stealing”, actually petty larceny. I had already learned stealing when I left two jobs, the first stealing the secretarial paper stacker, the second stealing two first editions by Weegee. I considered both to be due me by virtue of the much unappreciated work I had put in at each place. I knew the first had no value except to me, the second as payment for the harassment my boss had subjected me to. I remember his last words were “I’ll f**k you yet!”
And so Cannes began. Catching up on the present with my German and British dinner friends…talk of Merz, Starmer, tRump, Iran, Magyar and what good movies we had most recently seen. My last was Silent Friend by Ildiko Enyedi which I just wrote about, theirs was A24’s The Drama by Kristoffer Borgli, born in 1985 in Oslo, Norway…
…the director-writer, known for Sick of Myself (2022), Dream Scenario (2023) the one where Nicolas Cage is an old man who finds his life turned upside down when strangers suddenly start seeing him in their dreams, and Former Cult Member Hears Music for the First Time (2020). I put it on my To Watch List.
Next day, I slept til 9am when the alarm interrupted a great dream and I jumped out of bed to reserve my festival tickets…but 10 minutes late was already too late and everything was sold out…I am glad I no longer have to get up at 7am every morning to find out everything is sold out like we have had to do for the last two years…AND another improvement on the system is that you can see what the “catch up” screening is for that night at both 8:30 and 10:30 which requires no ticket, only a market badge. I now plan to see the Competition film Nagi Notes by Koji Fukada who now has three films at Cannes, including Harmonium which premiered in Un Certain Regard in 2016 and Love on Trial in Cannes Premiere last year). The Japanese drama is about a sculptor who lives in the shadow of a past love that continues to shape her art. Set in rural Nagi, Okayama Prefecture, the sculptor Yoriko carrying an unhealed loss has her quiet life disrupted when friend Yuri, a Tokyo/Taiwan-based architect, arrives to model for her work. Starring Terutarô Osanaï, MK2 is the international sales agent (ISA); and Fatherland by Pawel Pawlikowski starring Sandra Hüller as Erica Mann who travels through a war torn Germany with her father Thomas Mann. The Match Factory is the ISA. I just hope they won’t be mobbed and that I won’t have to hold a place in line for an hour in order to be admitted. I will miss the Special Screening of Groundswell, produced by good friend Paul Cohen. It was immediately sold out.
*Rijsttafel (RY-stah-fəl, Dutch: [ˈrɛistaːfəl] literally “rice table”) is an elaborate Indonesian meal adapted by the Dutch Colonists from the Hidang presentation of Nasi Padang from the Padang region of West Sumatra.