THREE cities, two plane journeys and a packed bus ride later, we finally make it to the scenic seaside town of Cannes in the south of France. With tall palm trees lining the 2km beach road, one cannot escape Ingrid Bergman’s face on posters as festivities kick off for the 68th annual Festival de Cannes.

I am here as part of the team representing Baat Cheet, a Pakistani short movie included in this year’s short film corner. The corner is more of an anthology of short films from across the world, which includes up to 2,000 various shorts. This year, two Pakistani films have been accepted.

During the festival, the French Riviera transforms from a lazy seaside town to a manic frenzy of meetings, screenings and red carpet events; to get in anywhere, you need an accredited badge. In the last few years the average number of accreditations by festival organisers has reached over 20,000 people. You cannot even step into the lobby of a hotel without someone asking to scan your badge. There is a hierarchy of badges, which determines where you get in and when.

We are at the bottom of this pyramid, with our white short film corner badges. That means we get access to almost everywhere, but only after queuing up for at least an hour. We manage to get into many screenings, including that of Standing Tall (La Tête Haute), directed by Emmanuelle Bercot, with which the festival opens, and Mad Max: Fury Road by George Miller. Red carpet premieres are tougher to enter, but we manage a few of those as well, such as Amy by Asif Kapadia and Marguerite and Julien by Valerie Donzelli.

This year, Pakistan had one feature film as part of the market, Abdullah, by Hashim Nadeem, the screening of which we also attend. As our film industry grows, the hope is more of our films make it to this international arena.

The short film corner is a great way to get introduced at Cannes. It gives you a feel for the place, but also makes you realise the uphill battle faced by independent film-makers in the sea of big-budget Hollywood studios. Our little corner feels like a sanctuary amidst the marketplace of films we are standing in.

Conferences at the short film corner are a great way to give us a crash course in the dynamics of this overwhelming international movie industry. At one such conference for first-timers, movie producer and director Sydney Levine and Peter Belsito have encouraging words to say: “The future comes from shorts.”

A friend had called the festival a “commercial zoo”, and I did not understand the meaning of that — until I land here. Ingrid Bergman may have been the poster child for this year’s festival, but she’s overtaken by the huge displays for the Hunger Games movie that is not coming out for another year, along with Terminator 3 covering the beautiful facade of the Carlton hotel.

To understand this, one must break down the festival; Cannes actually simultaneously hosts one of the biggest film markets of the year, called Le Marché du Film. This is where the main action is. The red carpet at the screenings and premieres may get all the international press, but most of the thousands of people that descend upon this town every May are here to make deals.

The Marche, or marketplace, sprawls over two floors of the grand Palais, which is essentially like a large convention centre with grand theatres attached to it for the screenings. Inside the Palais there are hundreds of stalls from all around the world, rented by companies such as international film distributors, sales agents, post-production houses, animation studios and also certain countries offering exotic shooting locations.

This market is where 4,000 films are bought and sold. The talk of the town this year is, ‘How to break into the Chinese film market?’ and ‘How to navigate digital space?’ Somehow I was under the impression that at a film festival I would get to talk about the art or even the technicalities of making films. Apparently not. The days are there to do business while the nights are for partying and networking, throwing in a couple of red carpet screenings along the way.

Cannes does teach you the importance of hustle. As a producer I am used to this, but not on such a scale. For example, for the first four days we relied on some online ticketing system that was supposed to assign us premier tickets for screenings; we kept hearing grumblings from the organisers that the system is new and no one really knows how it’s supposedly distributing tickets. Four days in, we decide just to try our luck and ask at the ticket counter if there are any leftover seats; lo and behold, we get some. Turns out, all you have to do is ask — that’s a pretty neat little life lesson right there.

Twitter @mahawishrezvi

Published in Dawn, June 2nd, 2015

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