62nd FESTIVAL DE CANNES
from 13 to 24 May 2009
PRESS CONFERENCE
23 April 2009
INTERCONTINENTAL LE GRAND HOTEL
13-24 MAY 2009
You will find in this brochure the following informations :
A note from the President
Feature Film Jury
Cinéfondation and Short Film Jury
The Official Selection, comprising :
• The Competition
• Un Certain Regard
• The films Out of Competition
• The Midnight Screenings
• The Special Screenings
(The list of press attachés for the films in the Official Selection is attached to this brochure and is
regularly updated on www.festival-cannes.com)
13-24 MAY 2009
Where will the Festival de Cannes be in five years time?
Politics, allegedly, is the art of answering questions you haven’t been asked. I won’t be doing
that today.
People often ask: where will the Festival de Cannes be in five years time?
The only question that I find important is that of the future of independent, auteur cinema,
and thus the future of film festivals, as they are basically the same thing.
For a long time I believed that cinema was a kind of royal processional road along which one
went from Lumière to Griffith, Méliès to Stroheim, Eisenstein to Ford, Chaplin to Keaton, or
more recently from Almodovar to Cronenberg. But, in fact, it doesn’t work like that at all.
How do you know when an era is finished and another begins?
There are dates, of course, linked to technological advances: the arrival of the talkies, colour,
Cinemascope, 70mm, 3D, Cinerama, Imax, video, digital, Internet, new 3D…
There are periods in history: the wars, May 1968…
There are schools, genres, countries, talents…
There are trends and cycles.
But what would happen if an era ended without the new one announcing its arrival?
The last we heard, the type of cinema that we like, upright, original, unique cinema, the
cinema of byways, has been declared extinct by the thought