Cannes Film Festival 2014

Despite strikes and grave weather alerts, the 67th Cannes Film Festival took a kick start on 14th May 2014 with a crowd of international guests and celebrities from all around the world to honor the much awaited annual film making week this year. The Marché du Film is the most important event in the industry and the leading meeting place for 20 000 film professionals, including 3 200 producers, 2 300 theatrical distributors, 1 500 sales agents and 790 festival programmers.

It gives people the opportunity to network their skills and projects with some of the best professional in film making around the world. Actors and directors like Tonie Marshall, Sofia Coppola, Nicole Kidman, Ashwariya Rai, Christian Duguay and many more graced the event. It is usually a week of complete hustle bustle of conferences, competitions, awards and celebrity glitz and glam.

Since its inauguration in 1946, the Festival de Cannes has always celebrated passion for film. Throughout the years, the unvarying increase in participants and new economic issues has made the Festival the annual meeting place for film industry professionals. People from all around the world wait anxiously for the start of this unforgettable flight of events.

The first Marché du Film came to be in 1959 with a few dozen participants and one screening room made out of fabric stretched across the top of the old Palais Croisette. This miniature market became the international event it is today: conceived, organized, and planned around one goal: the successful production of all films.

This year’s opening ceremony started off with the confident and witty Lambert Wilson who entertained the crowd with fits of laughter and nostalgia from time to time. Reminiscing the directors and producers who had left the stage for good and also appreciating the new and innovative young professionals struggling to make a mark in the competitive clout.

The festival has had hard critique and has proved to be the best in film production and direction. The film “Grace of Monaco” initiated the press conferences of the week. The Australian actress Nicole Kidman was the first to speak, describing the demanding nature of playing Grace Kelly. "It was a real challenge, one of those parts that made a particular impression on me."

Olivier Dahan the director of the film refocused on the angle the film takes. "By looking exclusively at the year 1962, I wanted to give a complete portrayal of the actress and the woman in the intimate context of having to make some deeply personal choices. She is married, she has children, yet she is faced with some real internal battles."

Moreover, the festival was filled with fashion frenzy celebrities wearing amazing line of dresses and suits embellished with glitz and glimmer. The international festival has been managed by a board of directors and was registered as a non-profit association in France in 1972. Since then the festival has been one of the biggest in the film making industry.

On 14 January 2014, Pierre Lescure was elected President of the Festival de Cannes by the Board of Directors. He will take up his functions from 1st July 2014, taking over from Gilles Jacob, who has been appointed Honorary President.