I'm Back, and this time I'm in CANNES!!!

Sorry to the few of you who read this blog that I kind of left a cliff hanger ending on my posts from Amsterdam.  To sum it up, we finished the movie, I had a great time, got home safely, life back home was uncomfortably normal and now I am in Cannes for the festival.  Yes, I think that rounds it out nicely.

So my job in Cannes....

When I got back to the states from Amsterdam I kept in touch with the 1st Assistant Director from Amsterdam Heavy who also lives in New York.  He was looking to get a feature film that he had been working on, on its feet and ready to be screened at Cannes.  I then volunteered to help him do Public Relations for the film and keep him organized through the whole crazy process that is the Cannes Film Festival.

There were a few hurdles that had to be overcome before I could announce to my friends and family that I was indeed going to the festival again this year.  I needed a place (cheap) to stay, being a starving artist and all, and a badge to get into the festival.  For the first problem I visited couchsurfing.orf, a great website that hooks up fellow travelers with eager hosts in other countries and I managed to find the greatest contact in Cannes.  Her name was Celine and I gathered from our many chats on skype that she was a nice, fun and easy going person.  So my place of residence was set.  The badge was a but more difficult to come by because I didn't direct a feature or a short film so I couldn't go claiming that I deserved a badge because I didn't do that and the other way was to be part of the press, clearly not me either and the third was to claim myself as an actress.  Well the third option was the most realistic but certainly not going to be easy.  To date I have acted in exactly ONE film and I can be seen on film for a total of ten minutes.  But with my gift for spin and this uncanny luck that I sometimes posses, they accepted me as an actor in the festival.  I can also attribute this to someone being drunk when they were choosing people to be actors.

So now I had a place to stay, and access to the festival.  All I needed to do was book a plane ticket and be prepared not to sleep for two weeks when I got here and plan on sleeping very little before the festival trying to get paperwork and press releases in order.

So now the festival is upon me and things are already moving at a rapid pace.  It is work every day on the beach making phone calls, sending emails, and setting up meetings.  By night it is parties and networking. Sleep is a luxury that no one can afford here.

For the opening night of Cannes I managed to get two tickets to the Red Carpet event.  Even though I am with a gaggle of people, everyone was more set on trying to get into parties rather than seeing the movie, so I took my spare ticket and found a lovely woman named Sara looking for a ticket and I told her it was hers but the only catch was that she had to sit next to me and take a picture of me on the red carpet.  Nothing like baiting a person to do what you want.  But here is the picture from my first red carpet!

That night I did not attend any raucous parties, just met up with a small group of people at a bar, had one glass of champagne and headed home.  It was a fun yet oddly relaxing night and if every night goes the way this one did, I remain happy, healthy, and well rested for the duration of Cannes.