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26-05-2025
PARIS: A power cut in southern France caused by suspected sabotage has disrupted screenings on the final day of the Cannes Film Festival.
About 160,000 homes in the city of Cannes and surrounding areas lost power early on Saturday, before supply was restored in the afternoon.
Officials said an electricity substation had been set on fire and a pylon at another location damaged.
Organizers of the international film festival say the closing ceremony will go ahead as planned as they have an alternative power supply.
Prosecutors say a first power cut occurred when a substation in the village of Tanneron, which supplies Cannes, was attacked by arsonists in the early hours.
At about 10:00 (08:00 GMT) the legs of an electricity pylon near the town of Villeneuve-Loubet were cut, triggering a second outage.
In Cannes, shops and restaurants struggled to operate.
“Another hour and I’ll throw everything away,” Laurent Aboukrat, who owns Cannes’ Jamin restaurant, told media. He said his fridges had been off since the morning.
“Cannes is in a total slowdown, meltdown, there’s no coffee anywhere, and I think the town has run out of croissants, so this is like crisis territory,” Australian producer Darren Vukasinovic told media.
Several screenings were interrupted by the cut in the morning, before festival organizers were able to switch to private generators.
Saturday is the last day of the festival. French actress Juliette Binoche and her jury are set to announce the winner of the Palme d’Or, the highest prize awarded at the festival.
Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has previously been put in prison and banned from film-making in his home country, spoke out against the restrictions of the regime after winning the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Panahi picked up the prestigious Palme d’Or for It Was Just an Accident, described by media as “a furious but funny revenge thriller that takes aim at oppressive regimes”.
He was cheered as he urged fellow Iranians to “set aside” differences and problems.
“What’s most important now is our country and the freedom of our country,” he said. “Let us join forces. No-one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do, or what we should not do.”
Panahi’s last spell in prison, from which he was freed in 2023, was for protesting against the detention of two fellow film-makers who had been critical of the authorities.
His trip to Cannes was his first appearance at an international festival in 15 years, after being subject to a long travel ban.
It Was Just an Accident was shot in secret and based partly on Panahi’s own experiences in prison.
“Before going to jail and before getting to know the people that I met there and hearing their stories, their backgrounds, the issues I dealt with in my films were totally different,” the director told the Hollywood Reporter.
“It’s really in this context (…) with this new commitment that I had felt in prison, that I had the idea, the inspiration for this story.”
The film tells the tale of five ordinary Iranians who are confronted with a man they believed tortured them in jail.
The characters were inspired by conversations he had with other prisoners and “stories that they told me about, the violence and the brutality of the Iranian government”, the director added. (Int’l News Desk)
