In parallel to the Official Selection, the Festival also runs non-competitive film programmes dedicated to discovering other aspects of cinema. These range from the historical nature of Cannes Classics, to the directorial debuts of the Caméra d’Or and the more public arena of the Cinéma de la Plage.

Cannes Classics: Since 2004, the Festival has celebrated the heritage of film with Cannes Classics. The programme’s aim is to highlight works of the past, presented with brand new or restored prints, and to give them a second lease of life in museums, cinemas and on DVD.

Cannes Classics is held at the Buñuel Theatre and offers a diversified thematic programme which is particularly focused on: new or restored prints, tributes to filmmakers or foreign cinema, documentaries on filmmaking.

The Caméra d’or: created in 1978, this programme focuses on the first features in any selections (official Selection, Directors’ Fortnight, International Critics’ Week) and awards the best of them.

Cinema de la Plage: opened in order to bring Cannes to the masses, the Cinéma de la plage is an outdoor theatre on the Macé beach screening films Out of Competition or from the programme Cannes Classics.

Have access to the complete program of the festival, as well as other details and curiosities, by visiting its official website.

The movie, based on a novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago, is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in one (unnamed) city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel follows the misfortunes of a handful of characters who are among the first to be stricken and centers around a doctor and his wife, several of the doctor’s patients, and assorted others, thrown together by chance. This group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the (also unexplained) good fortune that the doctor’s wife is, as far as we know, the only individual who has escaped the blindness. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and the social order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion and keep order via increasingly repressive and inept measures.

A movie by Fernando Meirelles.