The Cannes Opener
150,000 people, packed like sardines on the French Riviera for twelve days. Our field guide to this year’s Cannes film festival.
Hi everyone —
I loved reading today’s newsletter by Efosa on Cannes as it reminded me of when I first went when I was 23. Blagged my way in using my BBC employee badge. That yacht party that was headed to Italy that I had to somehow figure out how to get off of (though I sometimes wonder what if I hadn’t). The tux I had to borrow from some guy I had just met to attend a screening (I said I was 23!).
The line in the article about ‘be delulu’ is legit (I took it to mean naïve).
It’s actually a prereq for achieving most hard things in life.
Being naive is a superpower.
If you knew in advance how hard it is, how much blood and sweat it takes, how low the lows are to make a film, build a startup, make a record, or get into the NBA…would you try? If you knew in advance it would take 100 rejections before you get 1 yes — would you send each of those emails, make each of those calls?
And yet even after you succeed, you need to hold onto it in some form to do the next hard thing. And the next. And prevent cynicism from creeping in and realism from boring us to death.
Keep dreaming, keep striving toward your hard thing.
And if you’re attending Cannes, I hope you don’t (or do) end up on a boat bound for Tuscany.
—Shamir
CEO/Co-founder, Eddie AI
This week:
Cannes opens today with The White Lotus prepping to shoot season 4 on the same Croisette the day after the festival wraps, Letterboxd’s up for sale, Jack Dorsey resurrected Vine as Divine, and Timothée Chalamet leads Messi and Bad Bunny in the first fútbol ad worth watching in a decade.
Letterboxd’s looking to sell. Tiny, the Canadian holding company that bought 60% in 2023, has been talking to buyers including Versant and The Ankler. Twenty-six million users, mostly under 34, and still undermonetised. Co-founder retains veto rights over any buyer.
Jack Dorsey relaunched Vine as Divine. A human-only video platform where AI-generated content is banned. Ships with 500,000 archived original Vine clips. The man who killed Vine in 2017 is now funding its resurrection as “freedom from AI slop.”
Blender backtracks on Anthropic deal. The open-source 3D software accepted Anthropic as a Corporate Patron of its Development Fund, then reversed within weeks under community pressure. Anthropic’s money still arrives but just relabelled as a one-off donation instead of a membership.
Boris FX acquired Vegas Pro and is shipping a 2026 version with ProRes RAW support, AI transcription, and NVIDIA Blackwell GPU acceleration. The VFX plugin company now has its own NLE.
4,700 European cinema professionals signed an open letter to protect the EU’s MEDIA program. Coppola, Binoche, Skarsgård, and Östlund among them. A proposed restructuring could merge dedicated film funding into a broader cultural pot with no audiovisual guarantees. The vote lands May 12 - Cannes opening day.
Destination Cannes
Cannes’ first edition was supposed to open on September 1, 1939 but it could only screen one film and that was The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Further programming was halted when Germany invaded Poland the next morning.
The festival didn’t properly launch again until 1946, by which point the original political motivation had been replaced by something more useful - an industry marketplace.
That marketplace is the Marché du Film, and it’s the real reason most of the industry shows up.
The Palais des Festivals, which is a brutalist concrete bunker the locals call “the Bunker” - houses both the competition screenings upstairs and the market below.
The architecture tells you everything about the festival’s split personality: art on top, commerce underneath, and a red carpet connecting the two.
The hallways are narrow and overheated. Meetings happen standing up, in stairwells, or in booths the size of a phone box that costs more per square metre than Monaco real estate.
The density creates collisions that don’t happen anywhere else. A first-time filmmaker from Senegal sharing a café table with a Netflix acquisitions executive because there’s literally nowhere else to sit.
Cannes is a place where everything contradicts itself.. and so do my tips.
Follow the fun, but don’t chase it.
The best nights in Cannes find you. You wander out of a screening, end up at the Petit Majestic for one drink, get pulled onto a rooftop, then onto someone’s boat.
If you’re genuinely having fun, don’t leave for a party someone tells you is better. You’ll spend the whole night chasing a good time you already had.
The best version of yourself at Cannes is the one that’s actually present, not the one checking their WhatsApp for the next invite.
Don’t chase celeb parties. Don’t chase execs. They don’t care about you and it’s not how networking works anyway.
Stay in town.
Might be too late for this but alas. Yes, hotels and Airbnbs are triple their normal rate. Yes, Nice is only 30 minutes by train and Antibes is closer. None of this matters (unless you’re really, really trying to save money)
Stay. In. Town.
Cannes really is a 24-hours thing.
The late screening that runs to 1am, the drink that turns into a meeting, the walk back along the Croisette where you bump into someone you’ve been trying to email for six months. None of that happens if you’re catching the last TER at 11:47pm.
And if you miss that train, your option is getting a €50 Uber or waiting til 6am. Pick your poison.
Cannes is the best and worst place in the world to watch films.
You can be sat with 2,300 other cinephiles inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière, watching the first ever showing of a masterpiece in front of its director, with a ten-minute standing ovation that the cast visibly doesn’t know how to absorb.
But at its worst…Cannes gives you films, meetings, and a social scene with roughly enough hours in the day to do one of them well.
The badge hierarchy means you can queue 90 minutes and still not get in. Black tie is enforced for evening galas.
You’re sprinting between venues with no time to eat. By day five you’re running on espresso and a stale croissant you found in your tote bag, watching a four-hour Filipino drama at 8:30am and realising that croissant you just ate, was actually that business card you meant to throw away.
Don’t shoot for the execs.
Everyone arrives wanting a meeting with the head of acquisitions at A24, a handshake with a Netflix VP. You probably won’t get it. The top-tier executives are booked months in advance and move through the festival in a bubble of handlers and pre-scheduled dinners.
Shoot for the mid-level buyers, the junior sales agents, the development producers, the festival programmers who’ll actually sit with you for twenty minutes and remember your pitch.
The 25-year-old acquisitions coordinator in front of you in the coffee queue is more useful to your career than anyone on the fourth floor of the Palais, and unlike them, she’s reachable.
Be delulu, but also get real.
Delusion is the fuel. So send those cold emails. Walk into the Martinez bar like you belong there (you do - no one checks). Believe your short will sell, your script will get read, your idol will say yes to coffee.
Without that, you wouldn’t have flown out.
But Cannes is also not where careers are made. It’s where relationships might start that pay off in two years or five.
CANNES ROLLCALL
The White Lotus is shooting season 4 here. The hit HBO show will recreate the festival after it wraps, using the actual Palais and red carpet. The season is about fame, power dynamics, and who gets to be the plus-one.
Park Chan-wook is jury president. First South Korean filmmaker to hold the role in the festival’s 79-year history. He decides who gets the Palme alongside Demi Moore, Stellan Skarsgård, Ruth Negga, Chloé Zhao, and Isaach De Bankolé.
Two honorary Palmes bookend the festival. Peter Jackson collects his on opening night (May 12), Barbra Streisand on closing night (May 23).
Kore-eda’s new film is about a couple adopting a humanoid robot baby. Sheep in the Box from the Shoplifters director, who won the Palme in 2018.
Nicolas Winding Refn is back after a decade. Her Private Hell is his first feature since The Neon Demon (2016), starring Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton.
John Travolta’s directorial debut. Propeller One-Way Night Coach, adapted from a children’s book he wrote in 1997 about a kid obsessed with flying.
The dress code now explicitly bans “ludicrously capacious bags.” A direct nod to Succession’s Tom Wambsgans. Also banned: nudity, voluminous trains, sneakers at galas. Last year’s surprise hazard was the city-wide power outages.. fingers crossed for 2026.
Netflix removed A-Z sorting from its web interface. The drop-down that let power users browse by alphabet, and year in grid view just vanished. Netflix is steadily replacing manual browsing with algorithmic discovery, whether you wanted it or not.
A Jaws superfan built the world’s first life-size replica of the Orca. Moored in north Wales, open to the public, complete with yellow flotation barrels and a hand-built shark cage. He performs the USS Indianapolis speech at the end of every tour.
The Blackmagic PYXIS 12K is now Netflix-approved for 4K Originals at $5,495. Full-frame 12K sensor, 16 stops of dynamic range, box design. A sub-$6K Netflix-approved camera would have been unthinkable five years ago.
Someone built a free tool that finds royalty-free songs that sound like copyrighted ones. Paste a track, it searches 6,000 licence-free songs and surfaces the closest matches. .
This week we’re watching:
Who remembers the great fútbol ads from the 90s?
The stretch from “The Cage” through “Joga Bonito” to “Write the Future” when Nike and adidas turned thirty-second spots into pop culture folklore.
Adidas just brought it back.
Backyard Legends is the first serious attempt in over a decade. Timothée Chalamet leads a team of Messi, Lamine Yamal, and Jude Bellingham against a streetball trio whose decades-long unbeaten run has supposedly seen off Zidane, Beckham, and Del Piero.
As great as it is to see an ad released outside the Super Bowl with this kind of grand vision, the janky CG couldn’t help but make me feel even more nostalgia for the fútbol ads of a time gone by.
The below is still the GOAT.
Retail Therapy: The tablet that does less on purpose
The reMarkable Paper Pure is a digital notebook that doesn’t have apps, notifications, a browser, or any reason to check it every thirty seconds. It has a screen and a pen and you write on it. That’s it.
The 10.3-inch display has 21ms ink latency, which is close enough to paper that your brain stops noticing the difference. It weighs less than a pound and the battery lasts three weeks, which means you can throw it in your bag at the start of a shoot and forget about charging until the project wraps. Mark up PDFs, convert handwriting to text, sync to Google Drive and Dropbox.
Available at remarkable.com.