Every year, during the month of May, the Cannes Film Festival is held in France. We see celebrities from across the world, including Bollywood celebrities, gracing the red carpet in elaborate outfits. A few Indian films have also been selected to be screened at some of the prestigious screenings at the festival over the years. However, we do not know about a lot of the inner workings of the festival.
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For example, this year, we have seen celebrities like Urvashi Rautela, Esha Gupta, Sara Ali Khan, Mouni Roy, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, etc. on the red carpet. However, none of their films were screened at the festival. Instead, Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane, Sunny Leone and Rahul Bhat were the only real deal at Cannes from the Hindi film industry because their film ‘Kennedy’ was being screened at the festival.
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Even social media influencers made it to the red carpet at Cannes, which made a lot of people question their presence.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui, in an interview, made some eye-opening claims about the Cannes Film Festival.
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Having been to Cannes back in 2012 for the screening of his film ‘Miss Lovely’, he revealed that filmmakers can screen their films at the festival irrespective of whether they have actually been officially shortlisted or not. All you have to do is hire an auditorium, arrange your own red carpet, click a few pictures and post them on social media saying that ‘Our film has been screened at Cannes’.
“What happens is, you can take your film (to the festival), irrespective of it being officially selected. There are auditoriums that you can hire. Give money to the owner of the auditorium, lay your own red carpet, take your own people, click photos there. Show the movie to your people. Come back and say, ‘Our film got screened at Cannes Film Festival’,” he said.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui further added, “I am yet to understand why half these people go to the festival. When we were there, people would be like ‘How and why are you here?’ We would tell them our film is here. They would then ask us where, and we had no answer.”
You can see this section of his interview here:
The sad part is that amidst all these schemes, the true essence and credibility of the film festival get lost.