It may not have managed to take place on ground this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic but the first online edition of Marché du Film (Cannes Film Market), the business arm of the Cannes Film Festival, is looking just as ambitious, promising and bustling as it has always been.
The special 2020 version that begins on Monday, June 22, and goes on till June 26, has been set up with a view to continuing to support the international film industry and its professionals. It will bring together over 8,500 participants for a total of 250 stands and 60 pavilions. Over 1,200 online screenings will run for participants and the rights to 2,300 feature films will be available to buy.
Marché du Film is the leading market of the film industry, at the heart of numerous project developments, film rights negotiations and sales and acquisitions of films from all around the world.
The new version of the Marché du Film has been designed to mirror the traditional Cannes experience as closely as possible, and will also offer professionals from around the world opportunities to attend over 150 events, panels and keynote talks, speed meetings and round-table discussions, as well as exclusive concerts of film scores from renowned soundtrack composers.
Among the highlights will be a discussion with 2012 jury member and two-time Academy Award-winning French orchestra conductor and composer Alexandre Desplat, whose latest collaboration with Wes Anderson on The French Dispatch is included in the festival’s official 2020 selection; and English composer John Powell, who is based in the United States and regularly collaborates with Paul Greengrass, having composed the soundtracks for The Bourne Supremacy (2004), United 93 (2006), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Green Zone (2009). He also wrote the original soundtrack for Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018.
There will be an online concert from Japanese composer and musician Ryūichi Sakamoto, renowned for his soundtracks for Furyo by Nagisa Ōshima, The Sheltering Sky and The Last Emperor by Bernardo Bertolucci, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score. Ryūichi Sakamoto also worked with Pedro Almodóvar on High Heels, Yôji Yamada on Nagasaki: Memories of My Son and Alejandro González Iñárritu on The Revenant. For this event, he has chosen to invite experimental artist and American musician Laurie Anderson to join him.
Another online concert will feature composer Gabriel Yared, who won an Academy Award for his soundtrack for The English Patient in 1997. Yared began his career alongside filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Jacques Beineix and Jean-Jacques Annaud. For the past few years, he has collaborated with Xavier Dolan on Juste la fin du monde (It's Only the End of the World) and Ma vie avec John F. Donovan (The Death and Life of John F. Donovan). He was a member of the Festival de Cannes Jury in 2017.
There will be a conversation between Chilean director, producer and screenwriter Pablo Larraín, winner of Berlin's Grand Jury Prize in 2015 for El Club, and whose film Jackie brought him three Academy Award nominations; and Efe Cakerel, Founder and CEO of Mubi. They will discuss the question: “What does film stand for in a post-pandemic world?”
Some of these events will be live on the festival’s website and its official Facebook page.
