Entertainment | Film & Cinema

The Cannes experience

A dubai distributor who has been visiting Cannes talks about his experience.

  • By Natalie Long, Deputy tabloid! editor
  • Published: 00:06 May 27, 2008
  • Tabloid

  • The Steven Soderbergh Guevara epic won Benicio Del Toro his Palme for best actor.
  • Image Credit: Supplied

Cannes is one big merry-go-round of glittering red carpet premieres, flash-bulb-popping press conferences and unimaginably lavish parties. (90 per cent of which are held on yachts in the bay. Yes, we're talking about you, P. Diddy.)

Or so the directors, actors and their many hangers-on would have you believe. But the movies are big (big!) business, and although Cannes may look like just another excuse for a party, hundreds of industry insiders are at the festival, working hard to spot the next big film - most of which are not even beyond the planning stage.

By most accounts, this year's festival has been something of a washout, and although the stars refused to let the initial downpours of rain dampen their spirits on the red carpet, many film buyers found the market a little slow this year.

Salim Ramia, who has been visiting Cannes for the past 30 years with his distribution company Gulf Film, looking for movies to bring to the UAE, agreed.

"There weren't too many films this year, especially big blockbusters," he said, although for the local market, that's exactly what he's looking for.

Comedies don't perform well

"The trend in the Gulf is for action, adventure and horror. Comedies don't perform well here - with the exception of 27 Dresses," which was a surprising hit, he says. But despite the difficulty of bringing comedy to the UAE's language melting pot, Ramia was quick to snap up Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

That film, Ramia says, he bought at Cannes two years ago, when the film didn't even have a name, let alone a script. This year, he bought up Allen's next production, again, without any details.

"When I go to Cannes every year, it's to ‘pre-buy' films that are in production. None of them are even ready. We actually bought Che [the Steven Soderbergh Guevara epic that won Benicio Del Toro his Palme for best actor] three years ago."

Nice choice - although the film has been knocked by some critics for being overlong. But paying for a film before it's even made - isn't that a bit of a gamble?

"It's a total gamble! You have to go by your feeling, by your heart," laughs Ramia. "You have to take an immediate decision. It's thrilling."

Films that Salim Rania bought at this year's Cannes (and which we can all hopefully see in 2009):

Point Break 2
Executive Order 6 (with Vin Diesel)
Whip It! (starring Juno's Ellen Page and directed by Drew Barrymore)
An unnamed Mel Gibson-starrer

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