Each year, around 35,000 journalists and film industry folks gather at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in the south of France to experience the full spectrum of cinema. Aside from a nightly screening on the beach open to the general public, new films by acclaimed figures and emerging global talent, restorations and re-appraisals of classics and forays into new forms like Virtual Reality are presented behind closed doors.
For this year's festival, I was lucky enough be selected for a ‘Three Days in Cannes’ accreditation, open to film buffs aged 18–28, which allowed me to be among the first to experience new, thrilling and thought-provoking films from around the world.
As part of the application process, I could choose which three days of the festival to attend from the following: the beginning when the most anticipated films have their gala premieres (May 15–17); after the first weekend when films that premiered in the first period are repeated, with some galas remaining (May 20–22); or the final three days (23–25 May) when the less-anticipated films premiere but when you have the best chance to see as many films as possible – there’s programming exclusively for Three Days participants, and the whole in-competition selection is rerun on the last day. I chose the latter option and was lucky enough to experience a gala premiere.
I left Melbourne and ACMI behind in mid-May and landed in the French Riviera.
Experiencing a gala screening
Wednesday 22 May
The in-competition films make their festival debut at around 7pm or 10pm in the Grand Théâtre Lumière (the ‘GTL’), the flagship auditorium in the Palais des Festivals, seating around 2,300 people. It’s named for Louis Lumière, one of the famous French cinema-pioneer brothers. Occasionally, special out-of-competition films like Furiosa (2024) or Top Gun: Maverick (2022) are screened here, too.
These premiere screenings are referred to as ‘galas’ and they have an infamously strict dress code. Tickets for these screenings include the note, tenue de soirée: which according to the festival means "a cocktail dress, a dark suit, a dressy top with black pants, a ‘little black dress’, or a black or navy suit with a bow tie. Elegant shoes with either flat or high heels are requested." As the accredited attendees make their way into the Palais, many are turned away by security for not meeting the dress code.
Galas are the domain of Cannes VIPs. The biggest names in filmmaking are often in attendance, drawn by the prestige of the festival. The high rollers of the press and the film industry equally want to be seen walking the red carpet. For these reasons, it’s incredibly difficult to get a ticket – they’re released for Three Days attendees at 9am the morning before the gala, but the higher accreditations get access at 7am. Even refreshing the web link all day in the hopes of picking up a cancelled ticket doesn’t guarantee you a place.
Instead, Three Days attendees rely on the ‘Last Minute' queue to get into galas. This is the system by which the Swiss-clock-precise festival ushering team ensures every gala is a full house, even if there are no-shows. Perhaps as many as a hundred ticketholders might not turn up to a gala, but that number always pales in comparison to the crowd of desperate folks with an accreditation but no ticket who have been queueing outside for hours before the event. As the start time draws nearer and no-shows become apparent, the ushers begin to admit large swathes of queueing hopefuls. This was how I was able to attend the world premiere of The Count of Monte Cristo, directed by Alexandre de La Patillière and Matthieu Delaporte.
Despite no guarantees, I rented a tuxedo that afternoon and put my faith in the queue system. I arrived at the Palais three hours before the film was due to commence and even then I was around fiftieth in line. Nonetheless, I made it through, and I was allowed to walk the red carpet and enter, about forty-five minutes before the screening.
I was ushered up to the balcony level of the GTL – along with the new friends I had made in the queue – where the sheer size of the auditorium filled by 2,300 people in their finest became fully apparent. On a large screen display, we watched a live feed of the cast and crew arriving on the red carpet. The film’s star, French heartthrob Pierre Niney, commanded the largest applause, but I couldn’t help but be amused by the second-largest applause going to the logo for StudioCanal, France’s leading production and distribution company, during the opening titles. This was a home crowd, after all.
The Count of Monte Cristo is an over-the-top, spare-no-expense adventure film; you could feel the French delighting in a “we can do it too” statement aimed at Hollywood. It played like gangbusters to the audience, receiving one of Cannes’ famously long-standing ovations: Deadline reported it as twelve minutes long, supposedly the longest of the festival (Palme d’Or winner Anora’s ovation was reportedly seven and a half). They were certainly clapping for a long time. However, I observed that the length of the ovations are based less on the Cannes audience’s appraisal of a film’s quality, and more on how many members of the film’s team are in attendance for the camera to cut to, each one further lengthening the applause.
A three-day whirlwind
Thursday 23 – Friday 25 May
By 9am on my first program day, I was already in a cinema, watching Jia Zhangke’s new film, Caught by the Tides. For two days, I practically lived at Les Arcades, next to Cannes’ famous Boulevard de la Croisette, absorbing the dedicated film program for Three Days attendees. I saw five films each day, one after the other, pausing only to grab a cheap baguette as I strolled back to the front of the theatre to line up again.
Seating was unassigned, so even ticketholders ended up queueing to ensure a good spot; but this meant that there was always time to compare notes with fellow program attendees. We were all part of a big WhatsApp messaging group; a quick scan of everyone’s country codes made it apparent how global our program was. There were plenty of French +33s, but also folks from Guatemala, Russia, Mexico, Hong Kong, Norway, the Philippines and more. Conversations with this international cohort of fellow film obsessives were fascinating. The group was also abuzz with ticket exchanges. Tickets weren’t linked to our individual accreditations, so we were free to swap as we pleased, creating a constantly active 72-hour marketplace.
On the last day, when the entire in-competition program was rerun in the Palais, I got incredibly lucky: 45 minutes before its scheduled start time (and while I was still in bed) I snapped up a ticket to arguably the most anticipated film of the festival, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, in exchange for a Critics’ Week screening that I would have had to catch a bus to neighbouring La Bocca to attend.
Tickets for Megalopolis had instantly reached capacity, and unlike the gala sessions, the last-minute queue was unlikely to bear fruit for more than a handful of people in the much smaller Salle Agnès Varda theatre. I was in a state of disbelief at my good fortune as I walked past the probably-two-hundred queueing hopefuls, and my jaw dropped to the floor when Coppola himself made a surprise appearance, personally introducing the film for what would be its last screening at the festival.
Megalopolis itself was fascinatingly singular. Every bit as out-there as you’ve heard, Coppola’s forty-years-in-the-making, self-funded $120-million opus is clearly an unrestrained vision. You can see the big ideas that got him excited, but you have to wonder if he had spent so long ruminating on this thing that he had lost sight of how best to realise it. Elements of this film will make you gasp – in bewilderment, in awe, in derision, across the spectrum. You won’t see anything else like it.
Out of the fifteen films I watched across my three days (and one night), I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend a few other films destined for film festivals this year in Australia and abroad.
Armand
dir. Halfdan Ullman Tøndell (Norway)
This film from the Directors’ Fortnight section of the program is led by Renate Reinsve – who I loved in The Worst Person in the World (2021) – as a single mother who is called into a parent-teacher meeting when her six-year-old son is accused of indecent behaviour with a classmate. Reinsve puts on a tour de force as tempers flare in the meeting, and the film is packed with capital-I ideas and directorial choices that bring a ton of flair to an otherwise theatre-style single-location drama.
Anora
dir. Sean Baker (USA)
The Palme d’Or winner was indeed the best thing I saw at the festival, an extremely contemporary story in both archetype and sensibility. The title character (a captivating Mikey Madison) is a young sex worker who falls in with a bratty Russian trust-fund kid. When his parents stop bankrolling and start watching him closely, a note-perfect farce ensues, but the final fifteen minutes packs an unforgettable emotional wallop.
All We Imagine as Light
dir. Payal Kapadia (India)
This one – the first film directed by an Indian woman to compete at Cannes – made me fall in love with its sense of rhythm and place. Examining a small group of women and their interconnecting stories, All We Imagine as Light is modest, gentle and wonderfully tactile. It’s about the things we tell ourselves in order to go on, home away from home and surprising yourself. The intuitive editing kept making me grin.
Parthenope
dir. Paolo Sorrentino (Italy)
The ever-celebrated Sorrentino (I knew him best for TV’s The Young Pope) concocts a film that lives up to its bemusing “a Saint Laurent production” titlecard. That’s to say, it feels inescapably like a perfume commercial, for better and for worse. The story of a young woman growing up in coastal Italy in the mid-to-late 20th century, Parthenope is absolutely stunning to look at, with an incredibly curated aesthetic style and sense of ‘cool’. You’d be forgiven for stopping to wonder what the point of any of it is, but it lands on pertinent and surprisingly eccentric ideas just a touch too frequently to be ignored.
I was spent after my fifteen-film marathon, and at the end of our final program day, a few of us Three Days participants stayed out and chatted through to the late evening. There’s plenty of glitz and glamour to this town that, at times, feels like a luxury shopping mall by the ocean. Aside from the thrill of attending my first gala, my time in Cannes was most fulfilling when I was sitting in communion with strangers in a big dark room for the third or fourth time that day, among the first people in the world to discover new and exciting films.
– Oscar Ragg works in the Visitor Experience team at ACMI, though he's currently taking a gap year away in France. He loves everything film and television, and his writing on cinema and more has appeared in The Big Issue, In Review, and Farrago Magazine.
Note: Oscar's trip was self-funded and he received accreditation independent from ACMI.