Cannes Film Festival: Māori storytelling, thrillers, docos - the Kiwis on screen and behind the scenes

From left: Leonardo DiCaprio, director Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Cara Jade Myers at the Cannes premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon. Photo/ Getty Images

Looming over the waterfront in Cannes, France, above the superyachts and across the bay from the medieval tower, is the Palais. A brutalist behemoth, this structure is the beating heart of the Cannes Film Festival, with enormous theatres, labyrinthine levels and red carpets rolling outwards like velvet tongues. During the festival, it’s teeming with activity: a scrum of industry delegates running to and fro, film fanatics queuing in their hundreds, and, of course, A-listers gracefully ascending the steps in their finest.

But if you swerve north along the teeming beachfront boulevard known as the Croisette, pass the myriad beach clubs hosting exclusive after-parties, and turn into the winding backstreets, you may find, several floors up The Grand Hotel, a strange little slice of Aotearoa. Inside, a plain-looking hotel room is transformed. Walls vanish behind floor-to-ceiling posters of New Zealand films, and side rooms have been converted into temporary offices. This is, for two weeks, the French outpost of Te Tumu Whakaata Taonga, the New Zealand Film Commission.

Jasmin McSweeney and Chris Payne, head of marketing and head of international relations at NZFC respectively, have been coming to Cannes for roughly a decade. Behind the star-studded premieres, Cannes is first and foremost a film market: producers come to finance their films, distributors come to buy them, and industry representatives from across the world are here to connect. McSweeney and Payne’s job is to make sure the cinema of Aotearoa is heard among this cacophony and to shepherd New Zealand film producers into finding partners for funding and distribution.

Down the road, some of Hollywood’s biggest movies are launching their first shot at awards buzz but McSweeney and Payne are not here to see them. Instead, they’re running a morning-to-night daily calendar of meetings, mixers, lunches and speed-dating events with the sole purpose of getting our films in people’s faces.

“The film industry is about relationships,” says McSweeney, who has worked at NZFC for 18 years. “Chris and I can send an email to anyone and they will reply to us, but that’s not what happens to New Zealand producers because they’re not known to them. They just become one of the many from around the world trying to contact them all the time.”

These events are where the seeds of partnerships between Aotearoa and overseas agencies or governments can begin, which can then germinate into major multi-national co-productions — films like The Power of the Dog, Evil Dead Rise and the upcoming The Convert, starring Guy Pearce. NZFC has 18 active co-production agreements with countries such as Australia, France and Canada, and it’s NZFC’s job at Cannes to help connect film-makers to even more international partners. “There’ve been a number of producers who came with us into Cannes having produced one domestic film,” says Payne, also the acting chief operating officer of NZFC, “and we’ve been able to see them grow both their market relationships in terms of finances, sales agents, and co-production partners.”

Guy Pearce in The Convert, a new film directed by Lee Tamahori.

It’s the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, and this year, there are around 50 producers and other industry delegates from Aotearoa, with 11 of those supported to travel through NZFC’s International Travel Fund. Everyone, however, receives support on the ground, and that’s tangible: when I stepped into the film commission office on my first day at Cannes, there was a familiar New Zealand buzz to the place. Old friends were waving at each other across the room, and McSweeney laughed as she showed me the lockers provided for New Zealand delegates, most of which were full and almost none of which were locked.

It’s a Wednesday. The festival has already started, and everyone is trying to shake off their jetlag ahead of what may be the most important week of their lives. I’m struck by everyone’s positivity, not to mention the films; oh, the films! Not the new Wes Anderson or Martin Scorcese screening down the road — I’m talking about the astounding bounty of brilliant ideas that the people in this room are here to get off the ground. There’s a wealth of brilliant Māori storytelling, along with psychological thrillers, provocative dramas and zeitgeisty documentaries, all with distinctly Kiwi, innovative twists. Every idea fills me with hope for the future of cinema in Aotearoa, and talent in this hotel room is nearly enough for me to run to the balcony and shout about to the world below.

Grand Hotel with NZ Film Commission banner. Photo / George Fenwick

But of course, that’s what the whole world is here to do, and it’s an uphill battle to be heard. Courtney Mayhew, managing director of Ahi, an Australian and New Zealand distribution company, has worked in the film industry for 15 years. Fighting for attention is particularly difficult in the face of continuing instability, she says: “[The industry] is going through a lot of volatility, and every single country is experiencing that. The thing that people do say about New Zealand is that for our size, we punch above our weight — whether it’s the film-making or just the presence, for a country of five million people, it’s impressive what we do.”

Mayhew is here at Cannes to buy films for Ahi to distribute in Aotearoa and Australia. Her calendar is so relentless she takes a protein shake in her bag every morning for mobile sustenance. “It’s screenings, meetings, screenings, meetings, screenings, meetings, back-to-back to back, and lots of walking,” she says. “Lots of bumping into people, and lots of bumping into Kiwis, which is great, because then you go, ‘Who have you spoken to? Can you introduce me to that person?’ There’s a camaraderie in helping each other out.”

There’s something in our smallness that helps us aim high, says Mayhew. “We dream big because we know nothing else. We’re just like, ‘I’ll try that.’ It’s naive enthusiasm. I think that that works in our favour, and some of the meetings I’ve gotten have definitely been from that — ‘Okay, I’ll just get in touch with that person.’”

Karin Williams, a Cook Island-Māori producer and film-maker, is here to package and finance an international sales agent to a film called Island Dancer, about a teen entering an elite Polynesian dance contest. It’s her first time at Cannes, but “the old hands are very generous with knowledge and support for the newbies”, she says. New Zealanders at Cannes are “tiny fish in a gigantic tank”, with our size both a help and a hindrance.

“Europe made around 1600 movies last year. The USA produced nearly 250, compared to New Zealand, which makes 10-15 films per year,” she says. “We are required to attach at least 10 per cent international market money [to features], which is a big challenge for our small indie films, especially culturally specific films that don’t have big stars or recognised directors.

“Cannes loves Jane Campion, but New Zealand hasn’t had a film in the festival since 2001.” (I thought, at first, Williams was referring to Shrek, directed by New Zealander Andrew Adamson, which screened in competition in 2001. She is not. Rain by Christine Jeffs screened in the Director’s Fortnight selection.) “Yet our producers still manage to finance and sell our films at Cannes, including indigenous projects. I get the sense international buyers are intrigued by us and our work.”

Jennifer Lawrence attends the "Anatomie D'une Chute (Anatomy Of A Fall)" red carpet during this year's 76th annual Cannes film festival. Photo / Getty Images

Indigenous cinema had a significant foothold in the first week of this year’s Cannes, with Australian director Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy and Martin Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon premiering in the first weekend, and the Indigenous Screen Office of Screen Canada hosting an indigenous co-production forum for producers to gather and share their wisdom. However, Williams says indigenous film-makers can still come up against frustratingly narrow thinking when seeking international support for their work.

“Buyers say they aren’t into indigenous content per se, unless it has a hook or genre twist,” she says. “In other words, it’s not a selling point unless the project is unique or outstanding. [But] with the growing indigenous film movement, we hope to see more films and film-makers breakthrough in future.”

Payne and McSweeney are cognisant that those barriers can hamper international interest in New Zealand films. The distance and exchange rate are prohibitive, and “we cannot get the international cast that a lot of films by UK, Australian or Canadian film-makers can get”, says McSweeney.

But on the ground at Cannes, our reputation and size catch people’s attention. “There’s a huge amount of goodwill and interest in New Zealand,” says Payne. “From the international industry, no one will decline a meeting with New Zealand. Normally they’ll say, ‘I would love to come to New Zealand’ or ‘I’ve been to New Zealand’ or ‘I want to bring a production to New Zealand.’

“Because of the size of our country and the size of our industry, we’re fortunate enough to pretty much know everybody who works in this industry really, really well. We can offer a sweep of bespoke activities, services, introductions, referrals, etc in a way many of our other sister agencies can’t because the size of their industry means they just simply can’t do it. For example, Screen Australia — a much bigger agency and much bigger industry — don’t offer anywhere near the suite of events that we offer in Cannes for their Australian producer base.”

Cannes is an insane place. Some of the most bizarre experiences of my life have happened within the short space of a few days: I said goodbye to friends at a party, only to turn around and see Cate Blanchett walking in.

Once needed to leave the press room to go to the toilet, only to find the doors had been shut, with hundreds of journalists essentially locked in for five minutes because the cast of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny were about to leave their press conference.

There’s also a surprising, but perhaps endearing, messiness to the festival. Screenings often start late, or begin while people are still entering the theatre; I fell down the stairs at the Indiana Jones screening, trying to find my seat in the dark as Harrison Ford punched his way through a moving train on screen in front of me. A significant portion of the Palais is also a casino, and I’ll never forget trying to concentrate on Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in May December, a film full of lingering silences and careful dialogue, while the reverberations of club music pounded through the walls.

The days are so long, and everyone is so sleep-deprived, that you can almost guarantee someone will begin snoring halfway through a press screening, in need of a gentle shake by other journalists. Fatigue left me emotionally unshielded in many screenings, with several films sending me into surprise floods of tears. One afternoon, in a drifting, sleep-deprived haze, I found myself strangely moved and utterly transfixed as I walked past the red carpet in between premieres and watched the staff diligently vacuum the red carpet back into a plush crimson.

Town. Photo / George Fenwick

Though thousands of miles from home, I am certainly not the only New Zealander finding this overwhelming. “It’s chaotic, and it’s stressful. It’s not unusual for people to cry in Cannes,” says McSweeney. “And people get lost. Everyone’s under high pressure. You may have meetings that you’ve scored with a great person who may or may not turn up, or who may just say they can’t do the meeting now because they’re trying to close a deal.

“It’s very stressful, and you’ve got to remain very calm and very focused. It may seem that we go to a lot of parties and events in Cannes, but the reason we go to those parties is because if you can’t get a meeting with that person, you go to the party, because you know that they’ll be there, and you can corner them and pitch your little heart away.”

You may score a deal. You may not. Either way, the next morning, you wander down the Croisette, have an espresso, eat a croissant, piece your sanity back together, and start planning for next year.