While this weekend sees the release of yet another Hollywood blockbuster, the global film industry at large has descended upon the South of France for the Cannes Film Festival. While most of us will never get to experience the festival ourselves, “Seduced and Abandoned,” a new documentary premiering this weekend at the Croisette, will explore the festival from the point of view of filmmakers and we got our first look at the trailer.
Produced by Alec Baldwin and director James Toback, the documentary follows the pair at last year’s festival as they tried to raise financing for a new project. Baldwin and Toback were able to score interviews with not only anonymous financiers and distributors but also some big names like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Roman Polanski, Ryan Gosling, Jessica Chastain (she really is in everything now), Berenice Bejo, Diane Kruger and James Caan.
The trailer is pretty short — just under a minute and a half — but it does feature some of the interviews the pair conducted with Coppola, Polanski, Bertolucci and Scorsese. There’s always a danger that a doc dealing with something so completely inside-baseball could be alienating, but with those kinds of A-list names talking, it’ll be hard not to sit up and pay attention. Although last week saw HBO picking up the rights, “Seduced and Abandoned” still has no airing date set. In the meantime, if your passes to Cannes got lost in the mail, you can still check out the trailer below, and we’ll have our review of the film for you in just a few short days.