20 Problems Only Cannes Film Festival Attendees Will Understand
It's not all high heels and champagne parties...
Being part of the Cannes bubble is an intoxicating affair; whirlwinds of screenings and furiously bashing out copy, or hob-nobbing to sell your film while celebrities and stars are flown in on rotation to walk the red carpet and offer the outwardly glamorous vision that is sometimes quite hard to remember when you've been queuing for two hours in the rain.
There's something about the world's most exclusive film festival that just gets under your skin. They don't always show the most brilliant films, but there is a commitment to the love of film and to discovering new things (both good and eye-gougingly bad) that is endearing.
It's a place fuelled far more by the free espressos that are wrestled for between screenings than martinis and champagne, but it remains one of the staples on the film calendar, regardless of controversies and disappointments. And for a lot of film writers and makers, it's a rite of passage. It's just not always quite the same as what you might expect it to be when you're first feverishly filling in your application.
So with this year's festival in full flow, it's the perfect opportunity to look through the very specific culture of the festival, and the problems nobody tells you about when they're recounting their tales of glamour and celebrity near-misses.
First world problems, you say? Pish, not a whiff of it...
20. Literally Seeing More Incest & Sexual Abuse Than You'd Ever Want To
There's very much an unwritten rule of Cannes - and particularly the Un Certain Regard secondary competition - that arty means exactly the same as mentally scarring.
Provocative imagery and gratuitous, and often extremely difficult to watch sexual elements replace actual creativity and all of a sudden you're painfully aware that you're sitting in a room with thousands of strangers watching something even perverts would delete from their browser history.
Yes, there are the true cinephile moments - like the critics all crying as one to the Up opening sequence, or the tide of appreciation that met The Artist - but you have to sit through some serious clouds to get there.