_{Anna Demianenko}

Anna Demianenko, Talent & Programme manager, at CineSud, first hatched the idea of the Cannes expedition in 2016/2017. She and Guido Franken (Director at CineSud) regularly attended the festival as filmmakers with projects they hoped to get financed. They had seen at first-hand how daunting it was to try to negotiate your way through the world’s busiest, brashest film festival.

“We thought it would be a wonderful idea to give a chance to filmmakers like us, emergent filmmakers, who do not know anyone, to come to a festival like Cannes and help them to network,” she remembers. “I realised how hard it is to be in a completely different environment where no-one knows you… you can be so worried, so insecure to present yourself.”

The idea behind ‘Talents To Cannes’ is to make the new filmmakers feel comfortable in this strange new environment. If they get it right, the festival is the perfect place to present themselves to the international industry and to generate interest and even investment in their future projects.

As Demianenko always tells them, the most important thing is not their latest work or walking up the red carpet but “building the foundation for the future."

Ten filmmakers from the Netherlands will be in Cannes this year as part of the programme. Eight have new short films. Two others meanwhile (producer Charlotte Driessen and writer-director Karsten de Vreugd) are 2019 pitch winners who were originally due to go to the festival in 2020, the edition which was cancelled due to Covid, and are attending this year instead. 

CineSud works closely with Cannes’ Short Film Corner, organising networking events and meetings during the SFC Rendez-Vous Industry - a market for short films, and making sure the filmmakers have access to workshops. Croissants, cornflakes and coffee are also on the agenda this year as for the first time CineSud is sponsoring the first ‘Short Film Corner’ breakfast at which the filmmakers can meet distributors and other industry figures.

The participants from the Netherlands may be a long way from home but the festival is an excellent networking base at which to meet established Dutch industry figures as well as international delegates who may become their future collaborators.

Demianenko is originally from Ukraine. She moved to the Netherlands around five years ago.

“I know exactly what filmmakers need because this is what I felt myself,” Demianenko says of the challenge of navigating a successful path through Cannes. She has personal experience of arriving in Cannes with a short film having spent a small fortune to be there and then discovering she did not know what to do. Even so, she managed to make connections. 

She talks of participants being at an event with “200 people or more… you are completely alone there. You can feel incredibly shy and useless…. what I have noticed sometimes when filmmakers come in groups to these events, they spend all two hours talking to each other because they are a bit afraid to go to somebody new.”

CineSud, though, will make sure they are presented to useful new contacts. Demianenko insists that they treat their time in Cannes not as an extended holiday but as work. “It is not partying and it is not only watching films. It is a job for six days, a full-time job, and they need to have so many aims.”

But the grind is totally worthwhile. When the participants next come to Cannes, maybe with feature films instead of shorts to present, they will feel like seasoned veterans, completely undaunted by anything the festival can throw at them.

To see the full list of the Talents to Cannes participants, click here. This interview is written by Geoffrey MacNab.
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