Cannes Film Festival

"I’ve been travelling to the Cannes Film Festival for professional reasons for a few years now – always with a camera in my bag. The first times it was still a Leica M5! In addition to the great programme of films, I’m interested in the unique atmosphere of the festival and its visitors: a mixture of excitement, evening gowns, exhaustion and Mediterranean attitude to life style.

I came to film and working as a cinematographer via classic photography. I like both fields and I’m always keen on the overlap of applied media, such as the photo-film work of Chris Marker, for example, or the photo sequence stories by Duane Michals. When LFI offered me a Leica M 240 at short notice just before leaving for Cannes, it was clear to me that I would make a photo-film.

For this project, I’m not so interested in the glamour moments as the festival is presented to us on television or in magazines, but rather a personal look at the surrounding scene: the visitors, the mood, the light, the sounds.

As with all documentary projects, you never know in advance what to expect: will it rain the whole time? Will I captured the appropriate motifs and situations? Will I get enough good pictures so as to be able to make a short film out of them? I was lucky."