A bit of Cannes
Celebrating its 60th birthday, Cannes still remains the top destination for filmmakers – auteur or amateur.
This year the festival opens with Chinese director Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights
The following is an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald with some interesting trivia.
THE first Cannes festival was held on September 1, 1939, lasted barely 48 hours and just one film was screened – The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara.
The festival was billed as the free world’s cinematic answer to fascism, but the lights of Cannes went off on September 3 when Hitler invaded Poland.
The Riviera-based event was dreamed up as an ideological counter to the Mostra film festival in Venice, which in 1938 gave its top prize to Olympia, a controversial film on the 1936 Berlin Olympics by the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
Cannes resumed in 1946 with 21 countries sending films, and 11 winning awards to keep as many as possible happy. Among them were David Lean’s Brief Encounter and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City.
Movies at the time were often black-and-white. Subtitles were rare and politics were very much an issue as the Cold War loomed.
Until 1972, countries selected their films for the festival, but Germany’s first film was selected only in 1949, and Japan, Israel and Spain in 1951.
In the 1950s several films were withdrawn to keep the diplomatic peace – films about colonialism, Nazi concentration camps and even Alain Resnais’s 1959 Hiroshima Mon Amour, so as not to upset America.
But Cannes is as well known for its glamour and its buzz as it is for its role as a window on the world. It was during the festival in 1955, the year film buffs discovered James Dean, that Grace Kelly, on the Riviera after shooting Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, met Prince Rainier, whom she married a year later. In the mid-’50s, Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren drew the paparazzi like magnets, but in the same decade the festival’s lust for starlets turned sour. After Robert Mitchum was caught by the cameras fondling the breasts of a British starlet, Simone Silva, she was sent home in shame and committed suicide three years later.
After looking askance at low-brow Hollywood blockbusters over the decades, in recent years the festival has launched box-office hits such as The Matrix and, this year, Ocean’s 13.
Agence-France Press
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Indiafm seems to be covering Cannes this year…
Day 1 of their report
nice find, dpac. thanks for sharing.
another good Cannes coverage from rottentomatoes:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/features/special/2007/cannes/
Tushar, Thanks for the link… RT is actually covering the event and also the movies… unlike the Indian sites which are simply reporting what star walked the red carpet at what time… excuse me… but it is Cannes… that means it is a film festival… that means BLOODY TELL US ABOUT THE MOVIES AT THE FESTIVAL DAMMIT!!!
LOL, Oz
Another great place to read about whats happening at Cannes
http://dir.salon.com/topics/cannes/
Salon is one of my fav websites.
Nice link, Mainak. I remember frequenting Salon during last Cannes but slipped my mind this time.