You have to hand it to Cannes head honcho Thierry Fremaux. He pulled it off. The 2021 Cannes Film Festival went on, during a pandemic, without much of a glitch. There was incredibly accessible on-site testing, a majority of attendees were fully vaccinated, and mandatory mask-wearing at every screening. All this as close to a total of 500 movie screenings were packed to the rafters, with no social distancing whatsoever. It worked. Goddamit, it worked.
Before presenting the final screening of the festival, Gaspar Noe’s “Vortex,” at the famous DeBussy theatre, the Cannes General Delegate went on-stage to announce that out of the thousands of daily tests administered over the festival’s 11 days, only 70 people tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. Fremaux went to add that “this proves that cinemas are not superspreader events,” which was then preceded by a towering roar from the crowd.
Now, it’ll be interesting to see how Venice and Toronto manage their own prestigious events. The delta variant is starting to spread more widely around North America and Europe, but Cannes has shown what the blueprint may look like this fall at film festivals. It seems as though cinema is truly back .. for now.