#7
cannes
♫ “Place To Be - Nick Drake"
In May 2026, the 79th Cannes film festival will be on.
I have attended the festival 3 times. Aways as a fan. But going for the first time in 2019 nudged me on to a path that would see me make my own films and help other make theirs.
Cannes is the juice. I love a good screening and there really is nothing like a screening at Cannes. People from all over the world collude to celebrate an interest that is considered fringe in your hometown or off-limits in your home country. Gathering with other weirdos and needing absolutely no small talk to hit it off when discussing a new European director’s scant back catalogue.
I met Hollywood producers, Russian theatre actors, American film students, chancers who snuck on to DiCaprio’s yacht and delinquents who failed. I crashed a networking event using my first ever cash bribe.
Sure, the extravagance and showiness of the posers and rich elite who need to be there, they are there too. It’s all part of the package. Movies. That’s what comes with it. Money. Power. Extravagance. Boats.
I love cinema, I found my people there. Like a great gig, you feel alive, connected and at the centre of the universe. Events like that are a kind of a painkiller too.
Roger Ebert attended this festival some 30 odd times, and he wrote about it in “2 weeks in the mid-day sun”. He writes that at first, it is a rush just to be there, as I felt. The charm of buzzy screenings, black coffee and cigarettes. Favourite pâtissiers. Celebrity brunch cocktail sightings. And after 30 years the charm is still there, but it’s the routine that delightfully marks the passing of time.
This year I won’t be attending to mark the occasion.
The best pass to attend on is the young Cannes pass (18-28) which I no longer qualify for. Instead, I am working on a film set, with some top-class actors and crew. If I was to talk to that person who boarded that plane in 2019, and came home and quit his job, I’d say: fuck yeah we knew we could do this. I had enough belief to crack into this world even though I had no clue how it worked.
Here’s the hard part though. It sucks. Like it mega sucks at times. You’ve never been more broke or more reliant on side-hustles. It is so much harder just to survive in this industry let alone have your “talents” shown. There are many assholes, many cunts if you will. I will.
And to the dreamers I say keep dreaming, cuz the reality will never be as good. BUT. BIG-BUT. This reality is cool as fuck too. You are not in a worse off place because you took a leap. You made a leap guided by a dream and you’ve landed in a random and often precarious but new place.
A few weeks ago, I got a job in the corporate world. And what would my wide-eyed younger self say to that – it’s fine. And your life is exactly no worse off. Back then all you wanted was the experience. Please don’t cry when that experience was harder and bleaker than you thought.
So how do I round out this article / journal. I miss Cannes. I miss being younger and inexperienced and more innocent. I have forgotten many times why I got into this line of work, what I was trying to prove, how unhappy I was before I knew anything of the industry. And yet I look back, over the crevasse of earned knowledge, to a time where I would have killed to be where I am now, and smile.
