A Canadian in Cannes

Calgary-based filmmaker David Christensen is attending this year’s Cannes Film Festival, trying to generate international interest in his feature debut, Six Figures. The world’s highest-profile film fest runs from May 17-28; throughout the event, Christensen will keep a journal for CBC Arts Online.

Cannes Diary: Entry I
May 18

I first came to the Cannes Film Festival in 2002, when I was just beginning to think about making my debut feature film, Six Figures. It’s based on the book of the same name by Fred Leebron. Four years ago, I was online one night poking around a web-based bookstore, looking for research material for a documentary I was working on. I clicked on the wrong link and Fred’s book came up. It sounded interesting, so I ordered it along with three or four other books for the documentary. I can’t remember what the other books were, because when Fred’s book arrived, I (almost) immediately knew this was a story that I could turn into a feature film.

Six Figures is about a young couple that moves to Calgary wanting more — a better house, a better job, basically a better life than the down-market one they’ve been leading. But more isn’t what they get: The husband experiences a lot of personal and professional frustrations and when the wife is attacked with a hammer and ends up in a coma, he becomes the prime suspect. The film asks whether this drive for affluence, and all of these petty frustrations he experiences, could have lead the main character to murderous anger. We premiered it at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall and opened it in five Canadian cities in March.

Now, I’m in Cannes again, this time with a dramatic feature under my belt and a slightly better sense of how the festival works. Only slightly, though. Behind the red carpet, the celebrity sightings and the huge publicity machines promoting the latest American and French blockbusters (apparently, there’s some film this year called The Da Vinci Code?) is a huge film market. Think “films” instead of “produce” and the thrust of the “market” becomes clear. Thousands of pictures from around the world are bought and sold here. Bollywood movies, Thai martial arts pictures, Japanese horror and North American action films, most of which you’ll never see in the cinema (let alone on the shelf at the local video store) vie for your attention as you wander through the labyrinthine halls of the Palais, the building that houses the Cannes Film Market. Away from the glamour of Cannes, this is where the business of filmmaking gets done.

As part of the market, films are screened in small theatres for prospective buyers. That’s part of the reason I’m here. My feature, Six Figures, is part of a group of 12 films in “Perspective Canada” (organized by Telefilm Canada) screening at the Cannes market. We’re all looking for buyers who will see them, buy them for lots of money and take them back to their respective territories.

It’s quite an arcane business. Buying and selling films is based a lot on personal relationships and a not-quite-clear hierarchical pecking order: theatre owners are really only interested in talking to exhibitors, who are only interested in talking to companies that distribute in their country or region. Distributors, in turn, prefer to deal with sales agents: companies that buy the rights to your film in the hopes that they can turn around and sell them to distributors in various countries around the world. So forget about trying to get distributors or exhibitors to come to see your film — if it doesn’t have a known sales agent attached, the interest just isn’t there.

My co-producers and I don’t have a sales agent — we own the rights to sell Six Figures around the world. Which means that we (and, let’s face it, everyone here with a first feature) are chasing after the nine or 10 reputable sales agents that frequent large festivals such as Cannes. Actually, there are a lot more than nine or 10 sales agents here, it’s just that there are really only nine or 10 sales agents who are even remotely interested in trying to sell art films like Six Figures.

In addition to our market screenings, I’ve also arranged meetings with various British and French producers for the next couple of projects I’m working on. Besides buying and selling, producers come to Cannes to find other producers to work with. The reality is that it’s not always possible to raise all of a film’s production budget in Canada — so Canadian producers come to Cannes looking for partners in other countries to work with and raise funds with. It’s very much a long-term relationship with lots of courting and dating and, if you’re lucky, betrothal and, well… OK, the metaphor strains but only just.

And what about the films here? It’s amazing the number of people I run into who say they come to Cannes and don’t see any films. Many, many producers use this occasion strictly for business and nothing more. I don’t intend to be like that — there are some great films showing in the market this year (most, again, will never make it to Calgary) that I intend to see. Though not the one about Tom Hanks and his professorial hair.

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