‘Cannes Uncut’ Documentary to Film During Upcoming Festival - Variety

A team of veteran British media types will use this year’s Cannes Film Festival to shoot interviews and footage for feature-length documentary film “Cannes Uncut.”

The picture is intended to be completed by next year and will mark the iconic festival’s 75th anniversary. The finished film will mix interviews and current footage with archive material.

“Cannes Uncut” is being produced by Colin Burrows’ Special Treats Productions, a company well versed in behind-the-scenes and backstage investigations. It has produced a range of documentaries, TV movies and electronic press kits for the film, TV and music industries.

No distributor, broadcaster or streaming platform has yet been attached, though Special Treats says that it is currently in negotiations with sales agents.

Interviews and reporting will be handled by Burrows, film trade journalist Chris Pickard, critic and former Edinburgh Film Festival chief Mark Adams, and Richard Blanshard, who was accredited as the official photographer to the U.S. and U.K. film industries at Cannes for more than twenty years.

The festival was launched in 1946, shortly after the end of WWII, as an event that would bring early visitors to the resort and casino town and expand the summer season for the hotels.

Since then, the Cannes festival has gone on to become the world’s pre-eminent film festival, and grown into a media phenomenon that defines sophisticated film glamour. The world has lapped up images and stories of the stars and starlets as they romped on sunny beaches by day and graced the red carpet and elegant parties by night.

“The Cannes Film Festival is famous as an event brimming with stories and characters as outlandish and dramatic as the films that have premiered there. ‘Cannes Uncut’ will celebrate the great films as well as the wild parties; the spectacular promotional stunts as well as the iconic talents; the glorious successes and the infamous failures,” said the producers in a statement.

“Some 75 years on, the glorious excesses, triumphs and failures of Cannes is a story that is ready to be told. A story brought together by a band of brothers and sisters who have spent far too many decades pounding the Croisette, sweeping up the red carpet, hiding in the sales bunker, and drinking and carousing late into the night,” they said.