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The Cannes Film Festival

In May 2008, I walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival for the first time. This sixty-metre strip is perhaps the world’s most scrutinized and publicized real-estate after the Oscars red carpet. The Cannes red carpet leads to the Grand Theatre Lumiere, a stunning, cavernous space that seats over two thousand people. This is where the competition films are screened. Hundreds of people line up to cheer the artists, who descend from swanky cars emblazoned with the festival logo. On either side of the carpet are rows of photographers, in tuxedoes, who capture the dazzle and disseminate the pictures to far corners of the world. This stretch captures perfectly the delicious cocktail of artistry, glamour and business that is Cannes.

I first attended the festival in 1999, as a correspondent for India Today magazine. The festival’s singular frenzy was palpable—when 30,000-odd people gather in a tiny resort town to celebrate, showcase and market cinema, the buzz is electric. It’s also intimidating. The festival is labyrinthine, and I spent most of that first visit deciphering the rules. First, the festival is only for industry professionals and the media. It’s not open to the larger public. Second, there is a strict colour-coded caste system—some badges allow more access than others. The most coveted badge for a journalist is the white one, which allows entry into screenings, press conferences and photocalls. The white badge is the Holy Grail and the festival’s press department confers it when they deem you and your coverage deserving of it. How this is ascertained, no one knows. To get there, you must first jump through the hoops of yellow, blue, pink and pink-with-yellow-dot badges.

I think I started with a blue (described in a Hollywood Reporter article as ‘the working-class badge’ as opposed to the ‘middle-class pink’ and the ‘landed-gentry white’). There were hardly any Indians at the festival then. I recall seeing only officials from the information and broadcasting ministry and filmmakers Shaji Karun and Murali Nair, whose films Vanaprastham and Marana Simhasanam were showing as part of the Un Certain Regard section. The National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) had a stall in the market, which is set up in the basement of the Palais des Festivals and where buyers and sellers conduct brisk business. Officials were trying to sell films like Ambedkar and Janmadinam but the neighbouring porno corridor was providing tough competition—starlets in skimpy clothing strutted up and down while titles like Hard Knockers were traded. Fortuitously, 1999 proved to be a big year for India—Marana Simhasanam won the Palme d’Or (given for best first film). It was the first Indian win at Cannes since Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! eleven years earlier. It was exhilarating to see an Indian film take a top prize, and I understood then the prestige and power of the festival and why it exerts such a hold on the film industry globally.

In 2008, I was invited to be on the jury of Un Certain Regard, a prestigious sidebar to the main competition. The jury was headed by German filmmaker Fatih Akin. I was the only representative of India in the official programme—no Indian films had been selected. It was an enriching experience to watch films together and then argue passionately about which was better. That red carpet was also unforgettable—mostly because I walked with the entire jury, and a minder shadowed us the whole time, instructing us on which side to look so that photographers could get better photos. The micromanagement was impressive.

By this time, I had switched from print to television journalism. I was covering the festival for the national English-language news channel NDTV 24x7. Between jury duty and reporting duty, there was little time for food or sleep. Not surprisingly, midway through the festival, I fainted, in the Grand Theatre Lumiere, wearing a beautiful Abu Jani–Sandeep Khosla outfit, right after the screening of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (causing my perplexed husband to remark, ‘the film wasn’t that bad’). The paramedics were called in. The problem was, I still had to do one last piece-to-camera for our television show. I eventually did it sitting in a wheelchair, which was hidden under my voluminous anarkali suit. There was something darkly funny and decidedly Cannes about the scene.

Over the years, the festival has become even more frenetic. Social media has added an urgency, so responses to films must be immediate. Along with print and digital coverage, we also need to constantly feed Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. All the while looking chic—Cannes demands a certain dress code. Even if no one is taking your photograph, you can’t let the festival’s fashion quotient down. The red carpet, of course, demands formals (a colleague was stopped for wearing jeans). But even outside of it, there is an unsaid pressure to dress nicely, which I’ve never experienced at any other festival. The setting—the azure Mediterranean Sea and the row of expensive shops and hotels that line the main street, called La Croisette—demands that you also upgrade your style.

But what anchors Cannes and keeps us all going back, despite the ornery locals and the ridiculous prices, is the cinema. Every year, the festival premieres films that set the global palate and reveal something of the current zeitgeist. Artists are discovered here and reputations burnished. There might be controversy and debate, but the noise is fuelled by a furious love of film. Everyone who arrives at Cannes in mid-May has cinema in their bloodstream.

One of my lasting Cannes memories is of meeting the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert. Among critics of a certain generation, Ebert is the gold standard. His voice—erudite without being esoteric—shaped generations of film viewers and filmmakers too. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. One of my favourite Ebert quotes is: ‘Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.’ But it wasn’t just his words that made me a devotee. It was his unmatched passion for movies, which continued even after he was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands in 2002. Four years later, his lower jaw had to be removed and he lost the ability to speak. But he transformed himself into a formidable figure online, continuing to review and opine about the movies.

We met on Twitter. I was one of his thousands of followers but he followed me back because he said he was interested in Indian cinema and he liked that I wrote, despite the restrictive character count, full sentences with punctuation. We decided to meet in Cannes in the lobby of Hotel Splendid where he was staying. He communicated via written notes. We chatted about Bollywood, the festival and the films we had seen. He was warm and witty. Ebert had been attending Cannes since 1972—naturally there were many stories to exchange.

That meeting cemented in me an enduring love for Cannes. It will always be, to me, a movie circus where magic happens.