The Cannes festival is, with its 77 years of history, is the most exclusive event in cinema. Celebrities, press, producers and film buffs gather on the french coast every year to experience a week-long party of unparalleled glamor and showbiz where the streets become catwalks, hotels become palaces, and film screenings are reserved exclusively for those who have managed to become someone in life (or in the world of cinema, which is the same thing).
Every year, at the foot of the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the festival’s most iconic screening venue, where the official competition screenings take place, film buffs of all ages gather with signs in hand begging for invitations to enter the gala screenings, since this is the only way to sneak in, walk the red carpet and rub shoulders with the biggest celebrities in the film industry.
The anthropological causes of begging for invitations will perhaps remain an unrivaled mystery. Will it be an act motivated by the desire to belong to a select group of individuals at the top of the elite? To feel important? Will the love of art be so strong as to remain idly while it is projected a few meters away the new masterpiece of the Italian director of the moment? Could it be that the greatest virtues of the cinephile are non-conformism, rebellion and subversion? If they achieve their goal, is the satisfaction as great as the anticipation? Perhaps the answer is simpler than it seems when it is understood that the purest and most passionate desire is to be part, ephemerally and anonymously, of the history of cinema.
The phenomenon of begging for invitations, more than a process, is an instinct to liberate art, to democratize the least democratic event of cinema, to be able to touch for an instant a piece of history that in the eyes of a cinephile could not be more transcendent than at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, dressed in a tuxedo and sitting next to some Instagram model taking selfies once the audience stands up to applaud the screening that has just taken place for more than ten consecutive minutes, thus fulfilling the dream of being part of the ultra select group of people who had the privilege of witnessing a cult film for the first time, in the theater where perhaps the most iconic chapters in the history of cinema have been written.
It is worth mentioning that some of these beggars are successful in their search, perhaps because of their charisma, perhaps because with their latin tan they have managed to conquer an elderly french lady who is willing to give them an invitation to help them fulfill their dream.
Perhaps, cinema, like any other medium of artistic expression, is driven by the desire to seduce, because cinema mysteriously knows how to do it, and here we are the interested ones, the enthralled, cloyed by the lights and the stars, by the camera and action, by the red carpet and the applause, by a single tear shed when the credits rolled, perhaps for having managed to enter the Lumière theater and not for the film itself, because cinema has that; irreverence and surrealism, long live the invitation beggars!