A Festival Can Start With Six Keys, Not One Carpet

Six suitcases came through a side door in Paris this week, nowhere near a red carpet, and nobody photographed them. They belonged to six filmmakers — from Spain, Lithuania, the Philippines, Malaysia, Argentina and Belgium — who had just been given keys to La Résidence, Cannes' writers' house for people who do not yet have a finished film to show anyone.

I have sat through enough festival openings to know the order things usually go in: premiere first, biography after, the director's actual working life reduced to a paragraph in a programme nobody rereads. La Résidence runs the tape backwards. It takes six people with a script and nothing else, puts them in rooms down the same corridor for months, and asks for nothing back except that they keep writing. No pitch meeting, no distributor hovering, no carpet at the end of it unless the work earns one years later.

This is the part of a festival that never makes the clip reel, and it is the part that actually explains the clip reel. Every director walking a carpet in May was, at some point, a stranger with a bad draft and a borrowed desk. The glamour is a weather system that forms over something much slower and much duller: a person rewriting the same scene for the ninth time in a room that does not care whether they are famous yet.

What I like about watching this stage instead of the premiere stage is that it strips away the only thing festivals are usually accused of selling, which is access. Nobody in that corridor has access to anything except time, and time turns out to be the rarer currency. A producer can buy a slot in a festival line-up. Nobody can buy a finished draft out of someone who is still arguing with their third act at two in the morning in a borrowed room in the 18th.

Six names, six countries, six scripts nobody outside that building has read yet. In a year, in three, one or two of those scripts will arrive in a cinema near you with a poster and a release date and a critic's quote on it, and the room where it actually got written will have already been reassigned to somebody else's unfinished draft, the desk lamp still on, waiting for the next stranger.