My Impressions of Cannes by ECU Filmmaker Fabien Dubois

This year I was at the festival presenting my short film High/Low, which was entered in the Short Film Corner.

This meeting place for short films is pretty interesting because it facilitates the exchange with other people from the industry (filmmakers, producers, screen writers, actors)

Unfortunately,it is difficult to get around to everything because so many people are signedup, and I get the feeling that this year it wasn’t easy on the SFC side.

The place is very friendly but there is a lack of organization that makes certain things difficult. 

I got the contacts I wanted concerning the distribution of High/Low, so for that part it is mission accomplished. (Now the difficult part is the wait)

I would have liked to have met more organizers in order to submit my film. 

It is pretty important in this kind of place to have prepared the field, have meetings set up, and know who to meet and why, they buyers, distributors, producers…

Once there everything happens very fast, schedules get filled quickly, meetings areone after the other, you have to be very active from the first days otherwise you risk missing essential events. 

When coming to this festival you have two options, see the films or work, the daysbeing relatively short.

In twelve days I only saw 5 films: L’Ouverture with Robin HOOzzz…zzz, Tetsuo 3 byShinya Tsukamoto, Outrage by Takeshi Kitano, Chatroom by Hideo Nakata, and the excellent Kaboom! By Gregg Araki.

I was also able to talk about my future projects and started hiring for certain jobs.

I just wrote a feature film, I’ll start shooting a “short film teaser” in September.

In order to present the characters, the stakes, and the style that I will go more in depth with in the feature film.

“Show Don’t Tell”

So my assessment of Cannes 2010, not many films but lots of nice encounters, and especially preparing for projects to come.