29/05/2006

The world’s biggest film bazaar is over. The 10,000 plus film professionals from 91 countries are back at home, checking sales memo deals and rewinding the Cannes Film Festival in their heads.

However, 2006 will be remembered as a tepid year. No big crowds on the Croisette, no true masterpiece in official selection. No real buzz or flurry of activity at the market. No major deals announced in the trades where sales and distribution deals were outnumbered by production news. As a result, everybody rushed home (or to the beach or nearby shops) and most offices were empty by Thursday afternoon.

"The general feeling is that Cannes 2006 was not a great year, but there was nothing terrible either", commented Robert Beeson from UK distribution company Artificial Eye. Most sellers agreed that all key buyers were there, but the market seemed more polarised than ever between ambitious star-driven films and smaller original arthouse titles.

Quality films in production or post-production that attracted a lot of attention included Mike Newell’s Love in the Time of Cholera, sold by Summit notably to the UK and Spain (Momentum), Benelux (A Films) and France (Metropolitan); Wong Kar-wai’s English-language debut My Blueberry Night, sold by Studio Canal to a dozen territories, including Scandinavia, Italy, Germany and Russia; Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind sold by Focus to key territories such as the UK (Pathe), France (EuropaCorp), Germany (Senator) and Scandinavia (Sandrew Metronome); and Olivier Dahan’s French-language Edith Piaf biopic La vie en rose, sold by TF1 International to the UK (Icon), Germany (Constantin) and the US (Picture House).

In terms of finished products, the 984 films (including 766 premieres) screening in Cannes had to do with picky distributors waiting for the last moment or good reviews to make up their mind. "People concentrate on films in competition first and follow only a few other films", said Joy Wong of UK-based sales company The Works. "And unless a film is very well reviewed, it’s become hard to sell", she admitted.

"Buyers of art-house films are definitely more cautious", added Thorsten Schaumann of Bavaria Film International Sales. "This is a problem because the risks to develop new talent will become harder to take. However, new technologies offer a bunch of new opportunities to launch into niche markets".