Cannes Diary

Eighteen hours later, I was at Nice. That’s where I was staying, which essentially meant I had to do the 33 km to Cannes everyday. The very first day, of course, I was as jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof, as questions swirled through my mind like some surrealist collage. Am I dressed alright? How should I talk…formal or informal? And heck, am I excited or frightened? But after that half-hour drive, my nerves somehow settled down. I was entering the portal of my ambitions. Just a couple of hours were left for the screening of my film at Gray 5 auditorium.

And oh, the city itself! It’s commonplace enough at Cannes to spot celebrities walking down its lanes, but that’s not the whole thing. The place oozes a kind of extravagant charm. I had an hour left for the screening, and my mind should have been on that, but you get overwhelmed by this sheer visual grace. I stopped by at a coffee shop and ordered a pizza. (Blame my palate if you will, but I really could not relish the food at Cannes.) As the order arrived, I was greeted by a Los Angeles-based journalist: he had read about me in one of the interviews in the magazine India and You and dropped down to ask me a few questions about film culture in India and in Bengal. “It’s not very conducive,” I told him. “But films are our way of handling challenges and triumphing over them.”

It’s 20:00 hours local time and I’m waiting for the screen to show my name! Pinching myself and waiting for the film to end at last, for that little moment of child-like thrill. And when the moment came, I could not see the screen! People were already standing up and filing away slowly to catch the next film on their itinerary. As I reached the exit myself, I was greeted by one of the critics who said, “Bonjour to the world of cinema.” Honesty is a virtue in a critic. You’ll find the crème de la crème of critics in a place like Cannes, and they won’t lie—they speak from their guts.

On day two and three, I ran smack into the glam part of the festival! One could see the row of yachts waiting, all quiet elegance and ease. People relaxed in the Riviera sun out on the deck. In some yachts, there were celebrities being interviewed. Being a teetotaller, bars and taverns and other such after-hours places are not my scene. Believe it or not, I chose to spend most of my time on the last day of my visit at a conference organised by FICCI. I’d been invited to this buyers-sellers meet at Marriott, a delegates-only affair where I could approach a large number of investors, distributors, and professionals. You realise that the business end of Cannes goes way beyond gluttoning on movies. Films are not the only thing that matter here, it’s like a vast, interlinked web of pre-production and post-production networking opportunities. Still, the spirit in the air is festive, almost carnival-like. We could have coined the word Cannival to describe it, except that it sounds too much like another kind of gluttony.

Aneek Chaudhuri’s Bengali film, Streer Potro, was screened at Cannes this year