PROFILES

The Cannes Film Festival celebrates its 70th edition and its delegate general his 10th Official Selection. By way of a recap, Thierry Frémaux chose the diary format, to excellent effect.

There are grouches and know-alls who think the diary* that the Cannes Festival's delegate general kept from late May 2015 to late May 2016 doesn't settle enough scores or make enough titillating (damaging?) revelations. To them we could retort that maybe that wasn't the intention.... Humouring and intelligent diplomacy are by no means superfluous when you are (still) piloting the world's most important festival (at one time Thierry Frémaux envisaged joining Pathé in late 2015). For the last decade the movie world has hung on his decisions as film selector, and consequently with no interest what­so­ever in attacking a profession he sees as a vocation (he has been director of the Institut Lumière in Lyon since 1995). "I wanted to show what happens, write about a business community that's like and unlike so many others, that demonstrates cohesion, unruliness, conviction and talent. And I wanted to be faithful to Roberto Rossellini's words: 'I'm not here to take or to judge, I'm here to give.'" Thierry Fré­maux's diary navigates between profes­sional and private, promoting the "happy cinephile" idea and the team­work of his Lyon and

Cannes colleagues. His passion is infectious, as these excerpts show.

Roots. "I was born in 1960, the year Godard made Breathless, in the Isère département that I've never left. I grew up on the Minguettes estate in Vénissieux, where I lived for 30 years; I live in Lyon, to which I've always returned and where I found my first job, at the Institut Lumière that I've never left either. I never leave the places I'm from and I put down roots wherever I go, which sometimes poses a problem in life. And Cannes has become my life."

1800 metres. "From the top of the Palais the Croisette sparkles like a diamond snake, bustling with pedestrians and cars crawling at 5kph along global cinematography's most glorious stretch of road; 1800 metres exactly from
the Majestic to the Martinez."

Unsparing. "I'm in Paris, I'm on the Croisette, I'm Rue du Premier-Film [in Lyon]; leading a team, presenting films, welcoming audiences, living an on-going story with cinema. One day Bernard Chardère told me I was made for that. Like Cendrars, I was born unsparing." "Croisette attack". "I'm not alone, the Festival is also a president (Pierre Lescure now), a permanent team of 25 employees and a combat formation of 1500 people in “Croisette attack" mode."

Selection. "I'm often asked how we make our choices. Well, just like any amateur would; in reality, by feeling, intuition, passion, a few tools for measuring public opinion – if you can ever really judge its mood. We're suspected of any number of underhand dealings, unacknowledged friendships and secret pacts. But we have just one goal: to make the best selection possible."

Sparks. "Croisette influence is the Festival's capacity to create with one screening the spark that will set the global movie scene alight, to invent a radiant future for a debutant in a roll of thunder and a single thrust of the critics, in multiple reactions relayed endlessly by the international press to allow praise-packed articles, enthusiastic comments and standing ovations to echo around the entire world."

Hindsight. "When it's time to take stock, everyone reconstructs the competition with hindsight – it's easy to make an ideal selection when you know what the responses have been."

Lists. "The films we've liked can belong to us, to the extent that we don't even have to be faithful to them. To all official academicism and catechism – French cinephilia's tragedy – we must prefer the idea of the "small sentimental cinema” of which historian and writer Nino Frank spoke. A list of your favourite films always recounts a moment in your life. We should never cease making, rereading and revising them."

Sharing. "Being all together in a movie theatre, sharing the life, joy, tears and emotions of the world. Always the same since the Lumière brothers' invention." The end "When I die it won't be my life I see passing before my eyes, it will be the cinemas and films that made it precious."

Par Mireille Sartore