You didn’t think that we’d get the announcement of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival lineup without a little controversy, did you? However, in this case, it’s not the actual selection of films or filmmakers that is causing the issues. Instead, it’s a rule from last year regarding critics screenings that has changed, but still isn’t exactly journalist-friendly.
For those that didn’t pay attention to this drama last year, before the 2018 fest, it was announced that critics wouldn’t get advanced screenings for the films at the festival. This was mainly due to Cannes’ insistence that no bad buzz from negative reviews mars the official premieres later in the day. In order to prevent this, the critics were shown the films at the same time as the world premieres. But for 2019, the rules have been relaxed…a bit.
Cannes boss Thierry Fremaux said (via Variety) that this year, the festival will change how advanced screenings will change, yet again, in a more critic-friendly way. Unfortunately, when we say “critic,” we mean “select critics from TV and radio outlets.” The new rule says that TV and radio critics, hand-selected by the festival, no less, will be allowed to view the films before well before the world premieres because those members of the media need longer time to prepare their reporting.
But the news isn’t all bad for print reporters and critics. The 2019 Cannes Film Festival will also have 5 PM screenings (before the 7 PM gala presentations) that is open to other critics and journalists, which are hand-selected by the festival. This process of selecting which critics can attend the screenings isn’t a damage control situation, but instead is meant to eliminate non-journalists and non-critics.
In addition, there’s another change where critics will get a chance to screen the 10 PM screenings at the same time as the premieres, which is a big difference from last year, where the journalists had to wait until the following morning to view the late films.
Overall, it does appear that Cannes is trying to be more journalist-friendly after last year’s debacle. However, we’ll still a long way off from how it was before.