The press conference of the jury for the official competition in Cannes is the first thrill, the first pop. The festival hasn’t started yet. Outside, the red carpet is still being vacuumed. We plant the last nails, the drill is not stored. But on the inside, when Spike Lee and the nine jurors, four men and five women, came along, such was the admiration. Journalists are standing, cell phones are held, as if at a concert. Professional photographers or not.

“Thank you for staying behind the scenes and not bowing out (Editor’s note: Towards the jury). It’s a special year,” said moderates Didier Allouche, journalist hosting the conference in English. Journalists should stand up and remove masks when questions are asked, then put them back on immediately. Spike Lee wears his favorite hat with the “1619” logo, the arrival date The first black slaves to come to the United States.

So offensive, he also wonders “when will black people stop killing like animals” in the United States. After a Georgian journalist’s long intervention about the suppression of LGBT people in her country, several jurors salute her “courage” and Spike Lee attacks countries ruled by “gangsters”, from Brazil to Russia, not to mention Donald Trump.

Several moments of emotion are associated with this long pandemic. Brazilian director Kleber Mendoca Filho, who remembers coming to Cannes for the first time in 1991 as a journalist, had to follow the forty upon his arrival in France, admitting that he had not been to the cinema for fifteen months. “Same for me, it’s been almost two years,” American actress Maggie Gyllenhaal returned.

Melanie Laurent, an actress who also appeared as a director of the hit environmental documentary “Demain,” praised “this historic festival that brings us back to theaters and back to life.” “Me too, it has been a very long time since I have seen a movie in theaters,” repeats Tahar Rahim, one of the three Frenchmen on the jury.

‘A unique moment in a lifetime’

At the end of the table on the right–one swears she asked to stand there, at the end–a nearly disguised Millenn Farmer, in a red midi dress in openwork net. So elegant, we strain our ears to listen to his semi-whispered answers. Did she say yes right away, who doesn’t like to reveal herself? “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime moment, I guess you can’t refuse. This festival is quite extraordinary in the literal sense.” Fondest of Cannes?

You won’t want to get too involved in the discussion that has begun about the presence of a majority of women on the jury. Maggie Gyllenhaal asserts that “women make movies differently, and tell stories differently.” The singer will not send any message about politics, the place of women, or the social role of cinema: “My messages are in my songs and I write them myself. For the rest I am somewhat secretive. I keep my opinions.”

Outside we met his fans who waited all day to see him briefly during two visits, at the press conference and then the evening staircase. They laugh when we relate them to their queen’s words: “She’ll have to change the record, she always says the same,” loses a young girl with tenderness, her skin so white that she’s been fed since this morning. Wait on the asphalt without being damaged by the sun.

“Mylene, it’s Angel Davy.”

Muriel and Julie, two brides-to-be from Brussels, came with two flowers for “Mileen and Jodie Foster, which are so cute.” The couple had another vacation plan abandoned once they found out the singer would be in Cannes. His appearances are very rare. The last time we saw them was at prom in 2019, and there we have to wait until 2023. So we can’t miss it. “

However, the singer does not sign autographs. Not the type to take a selfie. “That’s right, but she still replied to fan mail, even after three or six months. They were joined by seven friends in their twenties, who got to know each other on Instagram and founded a private group of Mylène Farmer fans. Mary Rose clearly comes from Normandy and Corentin And Camille from Limoges and Axel from north of Paris. They walk and have no “money,” they smile. But as Julie says, “Milene, she is a divine angel.” The jury decided: their boss is she.