Fernando Pastorino, who holds a bachelor’s degree in Communication with a focus on Audiovisual Studies, had never traveled to Europe or to any other destination “of this magnitude.” “It didn’t really sink in until I arrived at the Madrid airport,” he said. He found a place to stay in Antibes, a town 8 kilometers from Cannes, so he commuted back and forth by bus every day.
“Getting to Cannes was quite a feat; because of a mix-up, I almost missed the bus from Barcelona,” he said. “I had to make a stop in the middle of nowhere, at a bus terminal with nothing but a giant parking lot next to it—just spots where buses pulled over and nothing else, not even a restroom or a café—in the middle of the road in France, at 3 a.m., for two hours in 2-degree weather. I was with a guy from Senegal, and I struck up a conversation with him; when he realized I was Uruguayan, he told me he remembered the 3-3 draw in the Korea-Japan World Cup, and the first thing he asked me was how Darío Silva was doing.”
On that first day in Cannes, I just had to pick up my press pass, but I couldn’t use it until the next day. “I didn’t have much to do; the weather was lousy, so I walked around a bit, and that night I went to the screening of *Grease*, which was introduced by John Travolta (I saw him from just a few feet away); it was right on the beach—it was absolutely wonderful.”
The sound and visuals were spectacular throughout the entire theater—the quality was impressive. It was a movie that everyone there knew by heart; you could see them dancing and singing—something completely out of the ordinary.
After watching *Grease* and seeing Travolta from just a few feet away, I had to get back to Antibes. “I’d checked the bus schedules: they stopped running around 9 p.m.; after that, there was one at 11 p.m., another at 1 a.m., and the last one at 3 a.m. I planned to catch the 1 a.m. one, but I realized it was only valid from Thursday to Saturday, and that day was Wednesday. The Uber wanted to charge me about 50 euros, so I stayed outside the terminal—because they close everything down—killing time until 5 a.m. I walked all over the city from top to bottom at 3 a.m.; the sense of safety you feel there is incredible. I walked with an Arab guy from Mauritania; we were talking to some Cambodians who had entered illegally that very day through the mountains of Italy, and we ended up chatting about soccer with them. And at 5:15 a.m., we finally got on the train. I arrived, slept for an hour, and went back to Cannes.”
“We’re talking about filmmaking techniques!”
Fernando Pastorino took advantage of his time in Cannes to interview the directors and actors of the films being screened there. And, as he said before leaving, “to sit down for 10 minutes with a director and ask him why he prefers to use certain shots instead of the typical, run-of-the-mill questions asked in every interview when a new movie comes out.”
In fact, Terry Gilliam was both surprised and relieved to hear a question about filmmaking techniques:
https://youtu.be/SgkgGp-Ra3Y?si=BhEdxg7OF7_F2x0D
Pastorino is not only pleased that IndieWire quoted him, but also by Gilliam’s reaction to his question. “I liked seeing the look of surprise on Terry Gilliam’s face when he realized I was asking him something about filmmaking techniques. It was really strange.”
“The Terry Gilliam thing was explosive. I walked out thinking, ‘He just gave me some killer headlines.’ No one else is going to get them, but if they make it out there, this is definitely going to blow up,” he said. “And that’s exactly what happened: I went to read an article about him and said, ‘Oh look, he’s wearing the same clothes he had on the day of the interview,’ and it was word for word what he had told me, and it turned out that IndieWire had picked up the interview to write an article where they mention me.”
Finding out about the call from IndieWire and seeing that they used my video for an article and mentioned me was surreal. It’s a media outlet focused on American TV and film that I follow closely; it’s very influential in the industry (...)
It was amazing. I went in kind of shy; I was sitting next to people from Reuters, the BBC, and AFP. I was chatting with critics from all over—I think I was the only South American there—and some really great interviews came out of it.
He also interviewed the Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov. “I hit it off with the guy; we ended up chatting about film. He told me some really interesting things about cinema and explained that, for him, the script is just a sequence of scenes he has to show, not what guides the film. He said he starts each scene knowing where it begins and where it ends, but that he takes liberties to create art in the middle,” he said. “He gave me a thumbs-up; he told me he shot his first film with the camera I was using during the interview. He congratulated me, said he found my questions interesting, and then asked his press agent to stay in touch with me so I could send him the short film I’d shot.”
He also said that Jonathan Pryce asked him where he was from and told him, “I’d been to Colonia and had a great meal there; it reminded me of Uruguay.” “I loved meeting Adam Driver because he’s an actor I admire, even though he was a bit curt with me,” he added.
https://youtu.be/3rGIaYUTuh8?si=HRwWasMZj_oi_mpJ
Between the screenings and the city
The "Three Days at Cannes" program featured two days of screenings from the official selection of films in competition.
He watched *Everyone Knows*, starring Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, and Ricardo Darín, and directed by Asghar Farhadi, “who won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last year but was unable to travel to the United States because Donald Trump had announced the ban on Arab countries the day before.” “It’s one of my favorites: it’s a real Hitchcockian thriller,” he summarized.
He also saw the Ukrainian film *Donbass*. “To be honest, I didn’t understand a thing, because in that theater the films only had French subtitles.” He saw the Japanese film *Sato*: “Cute, charming, but nothing to write home about.”
When he returned to Antibes, he explored the old town; “It’s beautiful—I ended up liking Antibes better than Cannes.”
“I ended up at a bar/museum dedicated to absinthe, a drink I really like and which, as far as I know, is banned here in Uruguay because it has an incredibly high alcohol content; it’s a drink that Van Gogh used to drink a lot of,” he said. “The menu had an asterisk indicating that they didn’t serve more than three drinks per person.”
When he went to bed, scrolling through Instagram Stories, he found out that Sting was playing an outdoor concert just a few miles away. “But I was exhausted—I’d only slept for an hour, and I’d walked a crazy distance.”
Another film that had caught his attention was *El ángel*, directed by the Argentine filmmaker Luis Ortega. “It was good; it had a Scorsese-esque feel to it, but I didn’t find it particularly extravagant. I have mixed feelings about the film—it’s good, noteworthy—and I also loved that the soundtrack featured songs by Pappo. Hearing Pappo at Cannes with that sound quality was incredible.”
On the last day of the Festival, he watched *Yomeddine*, “an Egyptian road movie that I could only see there and nowhere else in my life.” He remarked that it was quite entertaining, even though it was “a traditional road movie that goes through all the same stops that road moviesalways go through…”He also watched Under the Silver Lake by Robert Michel, who directed It Follows, “a horror movie that did incredibly well in 2014; for me, it’s The Big Lebowski of our generation, a super-bizarre movie that takes the structure of a neo-noir but does it in a super-absurd way.”
https://youtu.be/Y5K_aNcAuoQ?si=fvIDN76gEnNQNGA-