Well, we’ve come to the end of our fourth year at the Cannes Film Festival (and my fifth year attending), and I wanted to report on our final events and thank everyone who participated… especially the American Pavilion/Adobe Student Filmmakers.
The students are always the highlight of this Festival and I was more impressed than ever to work with them.
For the first time ever, Adobe sponsored a contest for the students to make films during the two weeks of the Festival for cash and software prizes. Adobe also asked me to be one of the judges and to recruit the others. I figured I had better find judges who are actually qualified (unlike me), so I asked Emmy Award winning filmmaker Jay Miracle and AFI Fest Programmer Shaz Bennett to join me on the panel.
The winners will be announced here in about an hour, so I won’t reveal them on this blog, but I have to say I was blown away by all of the films. The fact that these students even made fully edited short films (with Adobe special effects, no less!) is impressive enough. The fact that they were all good was incredible. I’m glad I was here to see the beginnings of some amazing careers.
As usual, the highlight of Cannes was the Third Annual SAGIndie Karaoke Night. I did not sing because they still don’t make enough alcohol, but I did enable the students by buying them drink tickets. 
John Cameron Mitchell, actor and the director of “ShortBus” (which I saw last night… and LOVED. It is a funny, moving, well-made film… and it definitely isn’t porn) was our special guest and performed a rousing homage to his home town “New York, New York.”
Some of the cast members also performed. Then they sang.
As the evening progressed, the audience got drunker and the singing got worse, but all-in-all I think everyone had a great time.
I’m looking forward to a week of vacation now (it may not seem like it, but it’s really hard to stay drunk for two weeks straight…), but before I sign off I just wanted to announce that SAGIndie has a new staff member. Scott Garner is being promoted (more on this later), so we have hired a new assistant to replace him. I’d like to welcome Eliza Hajek to the SAGIndie family. Eliza is a filmmaker and is much cooler than any of us (even you Scott), and, incidentally, she was an American Pavilion Student last year.
How’s that for tying it all together?
Ciao!