The 62nd Cannes International Film Festival is only a few days away and I wanted to talk to you about it a little bit. The festival is set to be held at 13.-24.5.2009 and of course the Zombies are attending and we will be reporting daily from the festival, so stay tuned for some Cannes Diaries from Zombie Room.
But first let´s go over what we did last year. We went to Cannes to promote two movies: Iron Sky and Sauna. At that point Sauna was already shot and in post-production, where as Iron Sky was still in development stages. We rented an apartment in the centre of the city and set up our office there. We brought all sorts of promotional material with us and practically wallpapered our whole office with them. We also brought two big ass widescreen TV´s to show our trailers in. Every night we held a Happy Hour in the office, which was a two hour party in the terrace. And to give the party that ever so special Finnish feel, we just had to bring in original Finnish beer Koff and some Finnish candy called Salmiakki. Needless to say it was a success. And on top of this, our whole trip was shot and edited in the form of Cannes Dailies, a video diary called Wrecking Cannes, which was reliesed in the internet. You can view all episodes in the below part of this post. It should give you a pretty good idea of all of our shenanigans in Cannes last year.
Well a year later Sauna is now released, so this time the main focus will be on Iron Sky. Sauna will be screened at the market though. We will be releasing some new visuals and actors from Iron Sky and we have one pretty special surprise, which I will be talking about a bit later. We have an office this year as well, although in a different place than last year. So don´t go looking for us in Rue d´Antibes, we won´t be there. We will keep you up to date on all the big news from Cannes in our diary.
I´m a bit ambivalent about the festival itself. It is extremely fun to attend, don´t get me wrong, but there are some dark sides to it as well. One of them being the infamous Marché du Film. The Cannes Market is the biggest film market for movies in the world. It is also the most disturbing one. The rooms and stands a filled with mostly sales companies. To you who don´t know how the market works, it is a place where sales companies sell their movies to distributors from all over the world. This is no place for film lovers, let me tell you. If you go there and just mind your own business you can get a pretty good preview of upcoming movies, but most of them you will probably never see again. But if you dare to go to the stands and ask about the movies, the first thing you will be asked: “are you buyers or sellers?”. If you tell the truth and say for example that you are a director or you work for a movie production company (or God forbid that you are a movie fan), they will just ignore you and look at you mean for wasting their time. Only way to get attention and see some kick ass previews and trailers is to just say you are a buyer. But like I said this place has nothing to do with art. It is all business.
The good part is the fact that you get to see a lot of films that will never get released at least not in Finland and especially not in the movie theatre. It is very weird that even the ones you think will get released don´t. Or you have to wait a year for them. This I think is just stupid. What I would like to see is a service where I could find all the movies from all the festivals and download them in high quality. I would be happy to pay for this, but since this isn´t happening any day soon, there is always another way. On top of seeing movies the festival is a great place to make new contacts and meet very interesting people.
You can see all of our adventures from Cannes 2008 from these Dailies entitled Wrecking Cannes. Enjoy!
Last year we had a blast! Let´s make this year even better!
See you in Cannes everybody!
- Essi
