Cannes President Gilles Jacob Weighs in on the Future of Independent Cinema and Film Festivals

indieWIRE posted a reproduction of a speech given by Festival de Cannes President Gilles Jacobs at the press conference announcing the Official Selection for the 2009 Festival de Cannes. He asks, “How do you know when an era is finished and another begins?”

He specifically praises the new generation of filmmakers from the East and Far East for reinventing cinema by “constantly stepping outside of the boundaries of the cinema of the past.”

If filmmakers take the festival up on its offer, the Cannes website will host streaming clips of the first five minutes of the Official Selection films at the time of their theatrical release. Apparently, a new era is beginning now:

Since our new website has greater bandwidth, we would like to offer this platform to any of the films in the Official Selection that would like to make use of it, when comes the time of their theatre release. The idea is to present to the audience, and especially young audiences, the first 5 minutes of the film and not the usual typical trailer that extinguishes all desire. Was it Altman or Renoir, I forget, who said that the great artists are at their best in the first and last reel? Let’s hope that Internet users everywhere might drop their games and be tempted to rush to their nearest theatre to find out what happens next. Let’s hope so, for the sake of the artists.