Notes on Cannes from a Van #1

Last night was a funny one.
For the last three months everything has gone into Cannes in a Van Year 3. It’s not an easy thing to get up and running every year when you have a pressured day job and most of your free time is taken up with all things van-shaped. It’s expensive (this year no sponsorship – tough climate and lack of time got the better of me) and time-consuming (thankfully Sam was on board to ease things up a little this time) with no ‘actual’ rewards apart from the satisfaction of knowing we did something good for filmmakers.
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The first two screening nights were great. Thursday: rocked up on the Croisette no probs, showed about 3 hours worth of films, met great people and went home at around 2 for some well-deserved vin rosé. Friday: Similar kind of vibe with more rosé consumed. Saturday night: The busiest night in the whole festival – DISASTER (in my head). Park up early, all-be-it far up the Croisette… all is good. ‘Hmmm, we’re chilled, let’s go for dinner’… come back, no van. Oh.
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I guess at some stage it was going to happen, we’ve been lucky these past years. In Cannes, you see cars towed every five minutes, but not big high-top yellow Transits which are trying to do a good thing for filmmakers and independent cinema. Maybe we thought the van was too big for them, or too British for them to bother with. Well, we got that wrong.
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It’s just that all I wanted for that busiest night of the festival was to screen films for 4 hours to people who’d never seen them, or even considered short-film from a van as a form of entertainment. Instead, I was racing around in Janus’s ‘support’ van trying to get ours back (thanks Janus for being cool). We drove back, got papers, went to the police station, got more papers, went back to the pound, paid 96€ and then drove round for ages. Finally pitched up at around 00.45, screened films and left. It was busy, but we were quiet. Disappointed.
Tonight better not go down like that.

Andy

2008 - A new beginning

The time has come for the second Cannes in a Van adventure to begin.

All we know is it will be exciting and we'll screen a LOT of films. 

Two things you should know:

1. We lost Jamie. I knew it. He just disappeared through a secret door to a parallel vortex where he's probably teaching ninja arts and writing great news stories.

2. What we lost in Jamie, we gained in Cath. She's writing the blog this year from the depths of our yellow Ford and it's sure to make for inspired reading.

So Cath... over to you...

Andy

CiaV

I say, we've lost him! Where for art thou J?

So, while Jamie is AWOL without computer, I thought I might fill in the empty dates with an entry about what's going on.

Well... after telling the film community of our imminent adventure, everyone is really encouraging and are totally rocking our world. The guys from 4Docs are getting involved against their better judgement and we have tons of emails and calls to get back to from numerous film-related sources. The journey is certainly beginning here! You can read Charlie from Channel 4's BLOG here.

I wrote to RR today in the vague hope he'll get my letters and maybe come down to a screening. We need a CiaV patron who loves what we're doing and can really draw attention to the films. Massive fingers crossed. I kinda thought Shane Meadows might be into it too. Maybe I'll look into it. In the meantime, I KNOW This Is England is gonna be great. Go to Shanemeadows.co.uk for more about his crazy world.

Anyway,

So much to do... so little everything.

KEEP SPREADING THE WORD... It reeeeeeaaaalllly helps!

Cheers

Andy
CiaV