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Culture in France

Not all glitz at Cannes 2010

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With only days before the glitziest event of the year in France - the Cannes Film Festival - tens of thousands of people are the on the edge of their red velvet, or rather, cinema seats to see who will win the coveted Palme d’Or this year.

Photo: Entre Chien et Loup
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The Cannes Film Festival, like other film festivals is where art and trade meet for two weeks every May. It’s in its 63rd year.

One of those people who seeks films far and wide, as well as at Cannes, is Brussels-based producer Diana Elbaum.

She and Sébastien Delloye run the production company Entre Chien et Loup. Elbaum says that she doesn’t notice the glamour at Cannes. She’s there to work, describing it as “two weeks of madness”.

She “walks and walks, and talks and talks, and drinks” at the Cannes Film Festival while “dreaming with others or by myself,” and honing in on filmy trends of the moment.

Like RFI’s Elisabeth Lequeret, one of our regular movie reporters, “Cannes is unique because … there are films for absolutely everybody.”

Elbaum considers that Cannes’ uniqueness is in the extraordinary wide choice it offers each year, from short films by directors just starting out, to new films by the consistently famous, to films for children, or even classics.

For example Manuel de Oliveira, who is more than 100 years old, has a film called Angelica in the section, Un Certain Regard, along with the unclassifiable, yet new wave film-maker Jean-Luc Godard.

However Elbaum recognises that this is a market, like any other, where products are bought and sold.

Entre Chien et Loup are co-producers of the film Un Homme Qui Crie (A Screaming Man) directed by Mahmet-Saleh Haroun from Chad and whose film Daratt (Dry Season) they also co-produced, won a Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2006.

They are hoping the competition jury, chaired by Tim Burton will give Un Homme Qui Crie a bit of a boost. Just being selected as one of the eighteen for the main competition at Cannes is a good start.

While the several thousand producers are in Cannes sweating over their deals at the market, the movie buffs with be lapping up the offerings on screen, and some certainly, will be wishing on a star to rub shoulders with some of the silver-screen gods and goddesses from all over the world.

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