Final preparations before the 60th Cannes festival

Since its creation in 1946, the Cannes Festival has been one of the main international cinema festivals, aiming to offer a programme that is both popular and specialised, open to productions from all over the world (Asia, Middle-East?).

Originally scheduled during the autumn season, it changed to the springtime from 1951 which reinforced its touristic dimension. During every two weeks, the public and journalists gather on La Croisette, motivated by the desire to approach the "stars" of the moment or for professional reasons to find out which films have been selected from the official competition or in a different parallel selections (Directors' Fortnight, Un certain regard...). In 2007, on its sixtieth birthday, the festival continued to uphold its rituals and codes: going up the stairs and the red carpet, the awards ceremony, the "Palme d'Or", started in 1955... To mark the event, the festival president Gilles Jacob invited 33 grand directors to the occasion (Cronenberg, Kitano, Loach, Polanski...) to participate in the film homage Chacun son cinéma, by each of them offering a short film of three minutes on the theme of the movie theatre, in essence the place where emotions are shared that's accessible to everyone.

Beyond the glitz and glamour and commercial negotiations organised around the festival, Cannes is also the assertion of an attachment to democratic values that the seventh art holds. Every year, the prizewinners are proof of these political and aesthetic engagements.