At Cannes, the global film industry contends with its very own impossible mission | Canada Voices

On the pristine beaches of the French Riviera, Romain Bessi is plotting a new global cultural order.

The veteran French film and television executive, who has experience running such top European production outfits as Newel Studios and StudioCanal, is sitting steps away from the thousands of producers, distributors and sales agents attending the Marché du Film, the premiere hub for buying and selling films, which runs parallel to the Cannes Film Festival every May.

Not too long ago, the energy inside the Marché was one of global harmony, every country (mostly) working together to ensure each other’s success in an industry built on the week-to-week instability of the unpredictable box office.

But at this year’s Cannes, things are different.

“People need to act as if there is no American market – as if we are not friends any more. We need to rely on our own friends, our own markets,” said Bessi, who came to town to raise money for his new production-company collective the Creatives. “People say, okay, it’s important for countries to have our own army, our own weapons, to be able to resist and not rely on the U.S. any more. And it’s the same with culture.”

Welcome to the 78th edition of Cannes, where the future of global culture, not to mention billions of dollars, are on the line.

Heading into this year’s festival – a 12-day marathon of red-carpet premieres, a hustle-driven market and beachfront cocktail parties where bowls of truffles are the norm – the mood was of a film industry on edge.

Having survived the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes, everyone in the cinematic ecosystem is reckoning with a series of crises.

First-quarter box office earnings have been exceptionally weak. The kind of high-profile distribution deals that typically arrive earlier in the year out of the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and the European Film Market in Berlin – splashy, multimillion-dollar news that can buoy the spirits of the industry – were few and far between. There are serious recessionary fears, with executives all too aware that the first line item to get cut in any household budget is entertainment and leisure.

And then, just a week before Cannes kicked off, U.S. President Donald Trump plunged the entire sector into a five-alarm panic when he announced, without warning or details, a plan to slap a 100-per-cent tariff on “any and all movies coming into our country that are produced in foreign lands.” Fear quickly spread that even the suggestion of a tariff could stop any Cannes business cold.

Yet in a twist worthy of Hollywood, the tariff anxieties didn’t extinguish the Cannes energy – or even lightly dampen the mood.

“People panicked about the tariffs for about two minutes,” said U.S. producer Marc Iserlis (Hotel Mumbai, Daliland), in town talking up his newly launched financing vertical, Republic Film. “Here, nobody’s really discussing it.”

Instead, all the Trump braggadocio has done is ignite an invigorating sense of solidarity among the international film industry, which is so often big-footed by Hollywood. Now, every territory’s film sector must look both domestically and toward each other to secure their future.

The esprit de corps vibe was on full display everywhere you turned along the Croisette, the festival’s famed waterfront promenade.

During the opening weekend, a coalition of European filmmakers including Cannes veterans Agniezka Holland and Cristian Mungiu unveiled a fiery manifesto condemning Trump’s tariffs plan that doubled as a call to arms for the continent’s artists to unite. On Saturday, France’s Culture Minister Rachida Dati urged industry members to get political and defend their culture: “Some people say, ‘No we don’t want to mix politics,’ but we’re not asking you to take pictures with us on an election poster. In Europe, American cinema occupies more than 60 per cent of our screens.”

Meanwhile, Chris Bryant, the British Creative Industries Minister, reminded festival-goers that “film is nearly always a multinational thing. You cannot create borders around filmmaking.”

This European-first mentality is the future that Bessi envisions – not necessarily a tectonic shift in international culture, but an expansion of the reality that the industry has already been reckoning with for years.

“Buy fewer Teslas and more Peugeot – it’s a feeling we have in Europe now because this U.S. shift has been quite aggressive,” said Bessi, whose firm represents production companies from across Europe. “American culture may no longer be the international, universal culture that it has been for quite a while. Now, it’s down to many other cultures, and where the opportunities are there. It’s an opportunity.”

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Fatima Djoumer, chief executive of the European exhibition network Europa Cinemas, echoes the sentiment.

“If the tariffs become real, it would be a really big problem,” Djoumer said. “But we already have a lot of agreements between European countries and other territories outside Europe in terms of production and cultural agreements. Culture is a soft power, and we need to retain that.”

The Canadian contingent attending Cannes – about 420 attendees from 250 Canadian companies – couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu at the festival. After all, before any tariff talk emerged, many of them had been engaged in a years-long battle to implement the Online Streaming Act (or Bill C-11), which mandates that U.S.-owned streamers funnel a portion of their Canadian revenues toward the development of domestic content.

There was a high degree of skepticism in the Cannes air as to whether C-11 would ever end up wringing any money from such American giants as Netflix and Prime Video, with more than a few insiders sighing in despair when the topic came up. (At the moment, the Motion Picture Association – Canada, which represents the interests of such major Hollywood studios, is appealing the C-11 mandates.) But other visiting Canadians took heart in the fact that their French hosts recently claimed a huge victory on a similar battlefield.

Earlier this year, France successfully pushed Disney+ and Apple TV+ to invest upward of 25 per cent of their annual French revenues to finance local series and films. And last month, a group of influential British MPs released a report urging foreign-owned streamers to funnel 5 per cent of their British subscriber revenue into a cultural fund to finance “drama with a specific interest to British audiences.”

“We’ve learned already that when the U.S. decides that they want to establish a brick wall against the world, that they can do that because we need them. But the world is saying, well, maybe we don’t need them as much as they think we need them, so in effect C-11 becomes really important,” said Noah Segal, co-president of Elevation Pictures, Canada’s leading independent distributor. “You’re seeing it now. The French are doing it, and others. They’re establishing that it’s beneficial to build your own culture, and it’s economically sound, too.”

While many emphasized that Canada still needs, and wants, the business of their long-time American partners, others noted that now was also the perfect time for Canada to double down on what the homegrown industry has long done best: international co-production treaties, of which Canada has almost 60 around the world (but not with the United States).

“Treaties allow you to have a higher budget to achieve your creative ambitions and potential reach, and also expand the crucial cultural exchange,” said Julie Roy, chief executive of the federal funding agency Telefilm, pointing to the recent case of Shepherds, a Canada-France co-production from Québécoise director Sophie Deraspe. Currently, the film is doing gangbusters theatrical business in French-speaking Switzerland.

Mostly, though, everyone at Cannes quickly tired of any tariff talk – with the most vocal exhaustion and bewilderment coming from Americans.

“That’s not going to happen, right? This guy changes his mind like 50 times a day,” said Richard Linklater, who was at the festival to premiere his new comedy Nouvelle Vague – the Texan filmmaker’s love letter to French cinema that was shot in Paris. Or, in other words, Trump’s worst nightmare.

At the press conference for Wes Anderson’s new comedy The Phoenician Scheme – which stars not only such Hollywood heavies Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks, but also French mainstays Mathieu Amalric and Charlotte Gainsbourg – the director was similarly baffled. “It’s complicated to me,” he said to chuckles. “Can you hold up the movie in customs? It doesn’t ship that way!”

The American attitude was summed up nicely on day one of the festival by Robert De Niro. Upon accepting a lifetime achievement award, the actor quickly pivoted from thanking festival organizers to lambasting “America’s philistine president.”

“You can’t put a price on creativity,” De Niro told the sold-out audience inside Cannes’ Grand Théâtre Lumière. “But apparently you can put a tariff on it.”

Ultimately, Cannes attendees left the Croisette feeling, if not exactly like they were walking on air, then at least newly determined to push through myriad challenges – from Trump, certainly, but also more genuine areas of concern, such as simply getting people off the couch and into theatres.

It helped that there were some eye-popping Cannes deals, such as the US$24-million that Mubi forked over to distribute the new Jennifer Lawrence/Robert Pattinson drama Die, My Love. The films playing the festival – from the new Spike Lee joint to the latest from Danish superstar Joachim Trier – were pretty impressive, too. And then there were the in-development films available for sale on the market.

“There’s certainly a lot of product, which is good – we got 45 or 50 scripts before flying here, and there are high-profile projects: Edward Berger’s new film with Brad Pitt, a new drama with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, one with De Niro and Jenna Ortega,” said Laurie May, Segal’s co-president at Elevation. She left Cannes having successfully closed U.K. and U.S. deals for a new “medieval zombie horror” movie from Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill.

“I always try to find the positive,” French executive Bessi said, staring down the shore. “I mean, otherwise …” he added, before lightly throwing up his hands in the air, the beach wind picking up. C’est la vie, Cannes. C’est la vie.