A Letter From Someone Not at Cannes This Year

Cannes opens Tuesday. By the time most of you read this, the Marché du Film will be open for accreditation, the Croisette will be filling up, the Carlton will already be booked solid, and several of my friends will be posting photos of themselves in linen looking variously sleep-deprived and triumphant.

I am not there this year. I want to write to the filmmakers who are, and the filmmakers who, like me, are watching from somewhere else.

When I Had a Film There

In 2014, Desires of the Heart was an Official Selection of the Marché du Film, which is the trade market that runs in parallel to the official festival, and the place where the business of Cannes actually happens. Marché is rooms not red carpets, suits not gowns. It is the engine room of the global film market, and most working filmmakers never see it on social media because it does not photograph well.

What I want to write about today is something almost nobody in our industry talks about honestly, which is the difference between having a film at Cannes and being at Cannes. They are not the same thing. And the choice between them, for a lot of working filmmakers, is more strategic than people admit.

What It Means To Have a Film There

When you have a film selected, accepted, programmed, or marketed at Cannes, your film does the work. The sales agents, distributors, festival programmers, and journalists who need to see it can find it on the official schedule. Buyers screen it. Sales calls happen. Press notes circulate. The international industry, which is the actual reason any of us would care about Cannes in the first place, encounters your work in the most concentrated week the year offers.

The film is the ambassador. That is the entire point of the festival as a business mechanism. Your film is doing the meetings on your behalf, in screening rooms and through the trade press and across the desks of buyers, while you go on with the rest of your year.

This is a thing I am still grateful to Desires for. The film traveled internationally in a way I could not have manufactured by being personally present in every territory. A festival selection is a kind of multiplier on your professional reach that does not require you to be in the room.

What It Means To Be There

Being on the ground at Cannes is a separate, additional decision. It is a substantial financial commitment, a ten-day disappearance from every other thing on your plate, and a particular kind of work that not every project requires from its director.

What being there gives you is real and worth being clear about. It gives you the relationships. The face-to-face with the sales agent who is selling your film. The dinner with the producer who might finance your next one. The coffee with the international festival programmer who could plug you into a circuit you do not yet have access to. The serendipity of running into someone you have been chasing for two years and finally getting fifteen minutes.

What it does not necessarily give you, especially if your film is already selected and the sales infrastructure is already moving, is reach. Your film accomplishes that without your physical presence. Some of the most consequential business deals at Cannes are closed by filmmakers who are not in the room. Their sales agents are. Their producers are. Their films are.

This is a calculation almost no one talks about publicly. There is enormous social pressure, especially in the age of Instagram, to be visibly present at the festival if you have any connection to it at all. Performing access is treated as part of the job. I would gently push back on that.

The Math Working Filmmakers Actually Do

The math, for an independent filmmaker with a film at the festival, looks something like this.

If your film is selected for In Competition, Un Certain Regard, Critics’ Week, or Directors’ Fortnight: be there. Those programs come with press obligations, scheduled industry meetings, and audience Q&As that require your physical presence. Do not skip your own moment.

If your film is at the Marché du Film and your sales agent is on the ground actively pitching to buyers: it is a strategic call. Some projects benefit enormously from the director being available for in-person buyer meetings. Some are perfectly well-served by a sales agent doing their job and the filmmaker focusing on the next project. Both choices are legitimate, and the answer depends on the specifics of your film, your representation, and your career stage.

If your film is at the festival in a more peripheral capacity: the question gets harder. The cost of ten days at Cannes is, for most independent filmmakers, in the five-figure range when you account for travel, lodging, badges, meals, and the productivity cost of being unreachable for a week and a half. That money is real. It comes out of next year’s development budget. The trade-off is not zero.

I know filmmakers I deeply respect who have made every variation of this choice. The honest version of the industry is that the best filmmakers are constantly making strategic decisions about where to invest their attention, and “where to physically be” is one of the most overlooked of those decisions.

A Note on the Performance of Cannes

I want to say something a little uncomfortable about the social media side of all this.

The version of Cannes that lives on Instagram is a version of Cannes that does not exist. The yacht photos, the sunset rooftops, the rosé in long flutes against a Mediterranean horizon — these are real moments, but they are an overwhelmingly small percentage of what working filmmakers and industry professionals do at the festival. They are also, increasingly, performed for an audience that has confused presence with success.

A director with a film selected for the Palme d’Or who never gets photographed on the Croisette has had a more important Cannes than a person with a borrowed badge who got into the right party. The work is the work. The festival is, for those of us not chasing influence as a primary career, a business gathering with extraordinary cinema as its centerpiece.

If you are scrolling Instagram this week and feeling like you should be on a beach in the South of France, I would offer this: the people having the most important Cannes this year are mostly in screening rooms, in market booths, and in meeting cafés. They are not at the parties. They are at work. Their films are the reason they are there, and their films are also, almost without exception, the reason they are not at the party.

What To Watch For From Outside

If you want a working filmmaker’s read on the festival without being there, here is where I would actually pay attention.

The In Competition slate will tell you what the festival programmers think great cinema looks like in 2026. Read the Cahiers and Sight & Sound reviews, not the trade reviews. Trade reviews are about commerce. Cahiers and Sight & Sound are about cinema.

The Marché sales reports, which you can read on Variety and Screen Daily, will tell you what the international market is actually buying. This is the most useful read of the entire festival for an independent filmmaker, and almost nobody outside the industry pays attention to it. The patterns of what sells at Cannes will shape what gets greenlit globally for the next year.

The directors who break out of Un Certain Regard and Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight are the directors whose names will be in your professional life for the next decade. Pay more attention to those sections than to the main competition. The careers there are younger and more relevant to where most of us are working.

And, candidly, ignore the red carpet coverage. It is not for us.

What I’m Doing This Week Instead

I am in post-production on Infection, which is not a film that needs Cannes. I am writing this from Los Angeles. I will be reading the same dispatches you will, and texting a few friends who are there. I am at peace with the math.

To everyone with a film at the festival this week, whether or not you are physically on the Croisette: this is your year. Trust your sales agent. Trust your film. The work is doing what it was made to do.

To everyone going: good luck. Take the meeting you didn’t think you could get. Sleep four hours more than you think you can spare.

To everyone watching from outside: keep working. The next film you make is the reason you’ll be in the conversation.

— James