The initial start of the trip to the Cannes Film Festival was a classic series of plane delays at JFK and Barcelona, oh and lets not forget a side order of lost luggage. However, my business Partner Angelique Monét and I arrived in Nice, France only a few hours later then had been projected. Living out of our carry-on's until the larger luggage arrived by airport courier the following morning, we made our way to the Cannes Pavilion to pick up our festival accreditation.

The city of Cannes is very tropical and hilly, sitting right on the French Riviera nestled in some hills that turn into mountains. It really seems like a city of side streets if you walk all the little roads off the two main boulevards in town. I'm glad I don't have to drive here!

The temperature here has fluctuated from very chilly to sunny and warm with sprinkles of rain over the first two days. Since then the weather has been nice and sunny during the day with a slight chill at night. It's very hard to know how to dress, especially when you need to look professional to take meetings with people in the industry from all over the world. There's a lot of people wearing suits, dresses and  tuxedo's (as you would expect) but I am surprised by the number of people with jeans and t-shirts, even during black tie parties. It's been the topic of discussion amongst many returning Cannes Festival regulars who have seen the slow decline in fashion over the last few years, possibly due to the economy.  Regardless, it's a sea of festival badges, tan-suited security personnel and white barricades. While it's a film festival, Angelique and I have been so busy with meetings and industry events, today (Monday the 17th) is the first day we've seen a film! The screening for Angelique's first feature film Deceptive is Tuesday at 8:00PM in the main Palais and most of our time has been promoting the screening for a successful turn out (as you can imagine, there's a lot of competition here). We made it down to the Cannes Short Film Corner to check on our short films and make some connections with other short film makers from all over the world. We've met people from the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, South Africa and Italy. One of the most difficult things over here has been internet access. As you can tell by the delay in this blog entry being posted, it's hard to get an internet connection in Cannes. We made friends with another filmmaker here named Franz Kennedy who gave us the inside track on an internet café with a great broadband connection. Someone has to vouch for you to get a membership (as it is with so many things in the Cannes Festival) and now we can access the web right on the beach!

It's Wednesday May 20, 2010 and the festival is starting to slow down a bit as most of the big players have flown home to continue taking care of business, but there's still plenty happening here as delayed meetings are being rescheduled, now that time is a bit less restricted. Going back a few days, Angelique and I were invited by Philo Pieterse, the producer of Winnie (the Nelson Mandella Story) to come to a party with the films two stars Terrance Howard and Jennifer Hudson. Shooting will take place on location in South Africa. The film event was hosted by the South African Pavilion who are terrific people that really make you feel welcome and at home. Angelique had a small chat with Terrance as he made his way through the event to speak with Press.
Last night was crunch time here at festival as there's a little known film contest inside the festival which is sponsored by mubi.com and Flip-Video. Last night we were busy shooting two short films simultaneously, my short film Stalker and Angelique's short film the Lady in Red of Cannes. The requirements for the contest are to be a director and have a short film in the short film corner. The contest films have to be three minutes and shot completely on the provided Flip-Video Ultra HD camera. We both qualified and thought it would be cool to shoot loose and hard to see if we could grab some great scenery here in Cannes and have fun in the process of making the short films on the fly. With barely any sleep, I began editing after we wrapped at 6:00am and managed to get the first film done just before I had to run to the Grand Theater Lumiere for a red carpet screening of Fair Game, directed by Doug Liman. This film has some special significance for me personally as a good friend of mine, Genevieve Detring was Doug Liman's second assistant on the film. She had mentioned the film to me while it was in production and didn't even have a title yet. When I found out the feature was screening here at Cannes, I made up my mind it was one of the films I had to go see. I can honestly say I was surprised by the story which was based on true events. It's highly political (which I didn't know before going to see it, I thought it was a cool spy movie). It was very revealing and a story that needed to be told.

The last few days of the festival have been great. Some of the people here have become good friends and plans are in motion for a fruitful year ahead. Speaking of fruitful, I had a few extra Euro's and nothing to do on a Thursday, so I decided to open my own café in Cannes, Caffé Galati. As you can see from the picture, after all my hard work on such short notice they still spelled my name wrong. Maybe it was my accent? Shortly after opening the café I received an offer from a German investor and was bought out. Things move quickly here in Cannes! Unfortunately I wasn't up to speed on the French taxes for sale of a business and once it was all said and done, I barely broke even. Angelique had a bit more success on the beach at the La Plage Café where we take a lot of meetings. We ran into Mads Mikkelsen, who played the role of Draco, co-starring with Sam Worthington in Class of the Titans . He was incredibly humble and great to speak with in a candid, friendly conversation. Angelique being the great producer that she is, had a short meeting with him and we are now an open discussion for Mads to come aboard the production for Bitten and Scorned, our action/vampire/romance feature film.