For eleven days in May, Cannes is the most photographed town on earth. Then the cameras fold away, the red carpet is rolled up, and a working Riviera port goes back to selling fish and renting deckchairs. We came for the second Cannes as much as the first — the one that opens when the festival closes — and found a town that wears its fame lightly, the way only somewhere genuinely sure of itself can.
I. The festival that made the name
The Festival de Cannes has gathered here every May since 1946, and in three-quarters of a century it has turned a modest seaside resort into shorthand for cinema itself. The Palais des Festivals sits at the western end of the Croisette, unlovely up close and unmistakable on a screen; its red-carpeted steps — the montée des marches — are climbed each evening by the people whose faces you already know. The prize at the top is the Palme d’Or, and a film that wins it is changed forever.
“For eleven days the Croisette is the most photographed pavement on earth; for the other 354 it is simply a seafront.”
II. Beyond the red carpet
The Palme is not the only crown handed out here. Since 2015 Cannes has also awarded L’Œil d’or, its prize for the best documentary across all the festival’s sections — a quiet acknowledgement that non-fiction belongs on these steps too. If the festival leaves you curious about where those films travel next, Indian Point Film maps the documentary circuit that runs from Sundance to IDFA.
III. The town the other eleven months
Climb away from the seafront into Le Suquet, the old town, and Cannes becomes a different place: stepped lanes, a square Romanesque tower, washing strung between shutters. The Marché Forville below it is where the restaurants buy, and where you should too. And a twenty-minute boat from the Vieux Port lie the Îles de Lérins — Sainte-Marguerite with its fort and the cell that held the Man in the Iron Mask, Saint-Honorat where monks have made wine for centuries and still do.
By evening we were back on the Croisette with an ice cream and no premiere to attend, watching the light go pink over the Estérel. The famous town and the ordinary one are the same handful of streets; you just have to come in the right week to tell them apart.
