Essay by Eric Worrall
This festival was reportedly dominated by visions of imaginary apocalypse, including climate crisis films.
Cannes Film Festival Power Restored After 5-Hour Outage Across South of France With Foul Play Suspected, Closing Ceremony to ‘Proceed as Planned’
By Ellise Shafer
May 24, 2025 3:06am PTThe city of Cannes was hit by a five-hour power outage on Saturday morning ahead of the film festival’s awards ceremony, with electricity finally returning around 3:30 p.m. local time. Despite the technical challenges, a festival rep previously told Variety that the closing ceremony would “proceed as planned” after the Palais des Festivals “switched to an independent power supply.”
According to Franceinfo, the cause of the outage may be foul play with two arson acts reported overnight and several power lines pylons were discovered to have been sawn off in the Alpes-Maritimes.
…
Read more: https://variety.com/2025/film/festivals/cannes-film-festival-power-outage-awards-ceremony-1236409107/
What is this mysterious “independent power supply”? Western media sources might be coy about naming the agency which rescued Cannes, but on this occasion the French media were up to the challenge of reporting the news.
Power failure in Cannes and in the Alpes-Maritimes: “serious acts of degradation” are at the origin of the incident
Two arsons were reported, while three pillars of an electric pylon located in Villeneuve-Loubet were then sawn Saturday morning.
Article written byfranceinfo
France Televisions
Published on 24/05/2025 12:17 Updated on 05/24/025 16:30…
From generators at the Palais des Festivals
This incident had consequences on the Cannes Film Festival, which must end in the late afternoon with the presentation of the Palme d’Or. The screening of the film Sirât was interrupted on the Croisette on Saturday morning, reports France 3 Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (New window), which also reports disruptions in the city and at the station. But the situation is improving in the city since AFP journalists noticed the resumption of traffic lights around the Palais des Festivals in the early afternoon.
The palace is currently powered by generators – three groups will be used for the proper holding of the closing ceremony at 6 p.m.
Read more (French, translated by Apple): https://www.franceinfo.fr/faits-divers/direct-panne-de-courant-a-cannes-et-dans-les-alpes-maritimes-des-actes-malveillants-sont-a-l-origine-de-l-incident_7269978.html
What makes this more amusing, the 2025 Cannes film festival, which owes its successful conclusion to portable fossil fuel power, was dominated by depictions of imaginary apocalypse – including the fake climate crisis.
It’s the end of the world and the Cannes Film Festival does not feel fine
BY JAKE COYLE
Updated 1:33 AM AEST, May 20, 2025CANNES, France (AP) — “Is this what the end of the world feels like?”
…As much as Cannes basks in the Côte d’Azur sunshine, storm clouds have been all over its movie screens at the festival, which on Monday passed the halfway point. Portents of geopolitical doom are everywhere in a lineup that’s felt unusually in sync with the moment. Tom Cruise, in “Mission: Impossible – Final Awakening,” has battled the AI apocalypse. Raoul Peck, in “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,” has summoned the author’s totalitarianism warnings for today. Even the new Wes Anderson (“The Phoenician Scheme”) is about an oligarch.
…
It’s not just geopolitical tremors quaking on movie screens in Cannes. Climate change and natural disasters are on the minds of filmmakers, too, sometimes in the most unlikely of movies.
…
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/cannes-2025-doom-gloom-movies-mood-ff276fba43706e6ac48833112795ffc4
There is no news yet on the identity or motivation of the pylon saboteurs. They might have been metal thieves – metal theft is a serious problem in Europe. But who knows, perhaps they were just ordinary people who were fed up with unwatchable films which lecture the audience about the director’s woke delusions.
What would any film festival be without plenty of films about the mythological climate crisis, environmental degradation, widespread human and animal annihilation and all the other doomsday scenarios? And what would they be like without all the role-playing high rollers visiting in private jets and high-end gas-powered vehicles and then consuming tons of red meat and gallons of fine wines for sustenance while urging the rest of us to adopt more sustainable lifestyles? So if anyone is searching for a large concentration of phonies beyond COP conferences, international film festivals are the places to start. .
Reportedly an ultra-left anarchist gang, who claimed the blackout was a deliberate attempt to cripple key infrastructure including research centres, start-ups, an aerospace factory, the local airport, and military and technological hubs.
More likely an extreme far ultra-left anarchist gang…
When I first heard the oxymoron “left anarchist”, it confused me; how can anarchy have any political slant, left or right? Then I found that some extreme left wing socialists think “property” itself is heresy. Everything is owned by everybody, or nobody, take your pick. I have no idea how they think that could work in practice. Can you even lock your front door? If you come back from work and find someone else has moved in, do you just shrug your shoulders and find your own unoccupied house to take over?
Then I found that the really extreme ones carry this on through to underwear and tooth brushes.
I’ve never actually read anything by these nuts. Usually socialists restrict their condemnation of private property to factories and other means of production. Part of me still wonders if someone is pulling the Internet’s leg, and I fell for it.
It’s communism, what you are allowed to use is determined by some vague body known as the people, aka a soviet dictatorship, and in practice, it doesn’t work.
You can have my underwear when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
“perhaps they were just ordinary people who were fed up with unwatchable films which lecture the audience about the director’s woke delusions”.
+1
Once again fossil fuels to the rescue.
Bottled sunshine … from the Carboniferous!
Ah.. The “Cann’t Film Festival”, for those that can’t make a saleable film.
I imagine there were important things that came to a halt. That is sad and unfortunate. The big question is, did ice cream start to soften and have to be eaten?
I and a few others were escorted around Cannes by a lady who had been in the French resistance. We watched Cannes put on their entry into a European fireworks contest from the prison that supposedly had held The Man in the Iron Mask.
Cannes is a lovely city by the sea. I hope it stays that way.