The Cannes Marché du Film is 60 years old. This is, quite rightly, grounds for big cele- brations for the organizers and for the Cannes Film Festival; it is also an opportunity for reflection.
When the Marché was integrated into the festival in 1961, as cinema veterans know Mifed, the first cinema market in the world, had just been born in Milan after its conception in 1960 within the Fiera Milano by the director of the time, Michele Guido Franci.
At that time it was an audacious and brilliant idea to think of separating cinema from its “ma- gic”: movies as products, an object to be traded in a businessman’s club. An idea that, for many years, gave Mifed the Market supremacy.
But time and the times overwhelmed Mifed which, unable to renew itself, ceased to exist in the early Noughties, rewarding the Marché’s foresighted formula: art, combined with glamor, fueling business.
The Marché du Film, which can rightfully consider itself to be the longest standing cinema market in the world, has benefited from this balance, wisely administrated by an institutional direction which today still offers the broadest spectrum of opportunities to everyone involved in making cinema: artists and entrepreneurs, big and small.
There is space for everyone, at Cannes, possibly exactly because the Festival has remained firmly anchored to cinema as art on the big screen and the Marché apparently lives and prospers in its reflected light.