The eventual cancellation of the 2020 Cannes Film Festival has been a long, drawn-out process. Weeks ago, when the rest of the industry expected the French event to be canceled, festival director Thierry Fremaux and the rest of the Cannes organizers were steadfast in their optimism that the festival will continue, even if it is just delayed. Then as that became clearly an impossibility, Cannes looked to team with other festivals to help keep itself alive in 2020. But now, speaking to Screen Daily, Fremaux admits that the 2020 Cannes Film Festival is dead.
“Under the circumstances, a physical edition of Cannes 2020 is hard to envisage, so we’ll have to do something different,” said Fremaux. “A ‘festival’ is a collective party, a spectacle that brings together an audience in a given location, in this case on the Croisette, in the presence of thousands of people. Everyone understands that that’s impossible this year. The Cannes Film Festival, which by its nature is a globalized institution, can’t escape being a victim in the same way as the rest of human activities.”
And unlike SXSW or Tribeca, there won’t even be a digital component to the Cannes Film Festival this year. The event won’t screen films for the press and hand out awards to films. The festival won’t screen any of the selected films on a streaming service, free to the public. None of that. However, Fremaux admits that Cannes 2020 will have official selections, which will be announced next month.
“Yes, we’re working on the list of films that should have been part of this 73rd edition. We’ll announce the list at the beginning of June,” said the Cannes boss. “All the films are scheduled to be released theatrically between now and spring 2021. The selection probably won’t be under the usual structured format that we all know with the Competition, Un Certain Regard and Out of Competition sections.”
He continued, “It would have been ridiculous to behave as if nothing had happened. But in our heart of hearts what we want to do is promote the films that we saw and loved. We received films from around the world, magnificent works, and it’s our duty to help them find their audience. Once we’ve announced the list, the aim is to start organizing events in cinemas. Professionals the world over with whom we’re in contact on a daily basis, tell us that this represents an opportunity for their projects.”
The films that are announced as official selections will be only for projects that plan on being released in theaters between now and spring 2021. And Fremaux admits that not every film that the event wanted to include in this year’s festival will be picked as an official selection. Some of the films are taking a full year off to wait for next year’s event.
“A number of potential submissions have chosen instead to wait for the selection process for Cannes 2021, which begins in the autumn,” he said. “There is a third category of films that are now being released directly onto the platforms. For now, we focused on the films that are due to be released in theatres and need our support.”
And while we are still weeks away from learning which films will be part of the selection announcement, Fremaux did reveal a number of films that were planned to take part in the 2020 event, if things had moved forward.
Those films include Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods,” which will arrive on Netflix on June 12, Pixar’s “Soul,” Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” and Nanni Moretti’s “Three Stories.” In the case of Spike Lee’s film, the Netflix release would have been an Out-of-Competition selection (due to Netflix’s issues with theatrical windows), and it would have coincided with the filmmaker taking part in the 2020 event as the official competition jury president. Now that the event won’t happen, Fremaux is hopeful that Lee will be back next year to take on the challenge.
However, as we’ve seen with the way 2020 has gone so far, with festivals being canceled, it’s unclear how anyone can predict what 2021 will look like. We’ll just be happy to have Cannes back.