Focus Features

Cannes, nestled comfortably on France’s Côte d'azur, with wooded hills to its back and the blue Mediterranean Sea before it, provides its resident population of 70,000 a strikingly beautiful home. In the 19th century, Lady Margaret Brewster described her impressions: “the sea so exquisitely blue—the sky so bright and cloudless—the rich sun upon the gleaming white houses so lovely….Cannes is the loveliest of all lovely places.”  And yet Cannes is most famous being the place people come to sit in dark rooms. During May, its population balloons to over double as the world film community descends, black tie in hand, for the Cannes Film Festival.  For Focus Features, Cannes remains an essential date on the film calendar, whether it is to screen films in competition, like Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock in 2009, or to sell films at the film market. Each Focus Features International unveils a remarkable slate of finished and in-production films to offer global markets.

For centuries, the area around Cannes was nothing but a group of sleepy fishing villages. The town’s name didn’t pop up until the 10th century, when a small village was dubbed Canua (named for the neighboring reeds). For centuries more, the town endured several epidemics and a few invasions. In the 17th century, Saint-Marguerite Island, just a half mile off shore, held the infamous prisoner referred to as the Man in the Iron Mask. But then everything changed in 1834 when the Scottish lord Henry Brougham was turned away from Nice, due to a cholera epidemic. Supposedly too cheap to pay the hefty prices for a place in Antibes, the English nobleman stayed in Cannes and fell in love. He not only built his own estate, Villa Eleonore-Louise, named to honor his deceased daughter, but he wrangled permissions from the French government to develop the area to accommodate British visitors. Through the 19th century Cannes remained one of the most fashionable winter destinations for British high society.

By the 1880s, the French, spurred on by the writing of Guy de Maupassant––with lines from “The First Snowfall” like “She came to Cannes, made the acquaintance of the sun, loved the sea, and breathed the perfume or orange blossoms”––headed South to join the British. Soon the place was awash in artists, aristocrats and those who aspired to be them. Cannes, like the rest of the French Riviera, quickly became, in W. Somerset Maugham’s cutting words, “a sunny place for shady people.” In 1879, the first tennis courts were built in Cannes. In addition to the French and English, Russian aristocracy found their way south, rubbing elbows with counts and barons from other countries. During the Belle Époque, luxurious hotels were constructed along the palm-lined Croisette for the town’s new guests. When the vogue for sunbathing hit Europe, Cannes’ beaches filled up, making the town now a destination for both summer and winter visitors. Of course, the resort was not to everyone’s taste. In the 1920s, P.G. Wodehouse scribbled in a letter, “Of all the poisonous foul, ghastly places, Cannes takes the biscuit with absurd ease.”

The rise of fascism in Italy pushed film lovers in France and England to find an alternative festival to the then establish world film festival in Venice. By early 1939, they had decided to hold the festival in Cannes with the cinema pioneer Louis Lumière as the festival’s first president. Everything was ready for the opening on September 1. Hollywood stars, like Mae West, Tyronne Power, and George Raft, were set to arrive by boat for the opening night. But then an uninvited Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, throwing all of Europe into War and cancelling the festival. The Festival didn’t get started again until 1946, and by 1952, no longer an alternative to Venice, Cannes moved its dates up to May. The festival has grown to being arguably the second most important international event in the world. But the forced glitz and glamour of the festival has not been to everyone’s taste. British actor Dirk Bogarde, who in 1984 was the first Briton to be appointed President to the Jury, remarked that Cannes is “my idea of hell. You see all the people you thought were dead and all the people who deserve to be dead. After a while, you start to think you might be dead, too.”  For more info, Nick Dawson provides a festival primer and Noah Harlan a guide to where to go while there.

Cannes, the site of so many film premieres, has also stepped in front of the camera in more than a few cases. Sometimes, like with Hitchcock’s elegant 1955 thriller To Catch a Thief or Frank Oz’s 1988 Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Cannes is cast for its glamorous look, being, with other spots along the French Riviera, a playground for the rich and famous. For others, the film festival itself acts as a film’s setting, whether it be for comic effect (Steve Bendelack’s Mr. Bean’s Holiday) or for intrigue (Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale). And then there are the documentaries. Cannes is the inevitable destination in films about making movies. Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith’s Overnight follows bartender Troy Duffy to Cannes on his way to becoming a film director (and then self destructing). And Wim Wenders’ experimental interview film Chambre 666 has different directors at Cannes go into a room alone to answer the question “What is the future of cinema?”

While the Cannes Film Festival remains the town’s most famous event, the metropolitan calendar is chock-full year round. After Paris, Cannes is France’s biggest trade show center, with many of them having to do with media in all its forms. For the television industry, there is Mipcom in October and Miptv in April, two of the leading world markets for television shows. In January, the music industry come for MIDEN (Marché International du Disque et de l'Edition Musicale). And in June, ad men from around the world fly in for the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. There are also shows featuring luxury real estate, luxury travel, yachts, fireworks, and board games.