Cannes, Right Now
FESTIVAL · THE RIVIERA
How to Experience the World’s Most Glamorous Festival — Properly
BY THE HARLINGTONS CONCIERGE
Cannes, May 2026
The 79th Cannes Film Festival is underway. From the 12th to the 23rd of May, the Croisette belongs, as it does every year in these particular twelve days, to the most concentrated gathering of creative and commercial power in the world. South Korean director Park Chan-wook — the man behind Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and Decision to Leave — presides over a jury that includes Demi Moore, Chloé Zhao, and Stellan Skarsgård. Twenty-two films are in competition for the Palme d’Or. The Carlton Terrace is full. The harbour is lined with yachts. And across the city, in rooms that no camera will ever enter, the conversations that will shape the next twelve months of the international world are already underway.
This is what Cannes actually is, for those who attend it properly. Not a film festival — or not only that. A convening. An annual moment at which the worlds of cinema, finance, fashion, media, and the particular international society that moves between all of them arrive simultaneously on a narrow strip of the French Riviera and, for under a fortnight, occupy the same rooms, the same terraces, the same harbour. The films are the occasion. The festival is the pretext. What it produces, in the evenings that follow the screenings and in the mornings that follow the evenings, is something considerably more interesting than any single film.
If you are in Cannes this week, or if you are planning to attend in a future year, this guide is for how to be there well. Not as a spectator on the Croisette, but as someone for whom the festival delivers what it is actually capable of.
UNDERSTANDING THE FESTIVAL’S TRUE GEOGRAPHY
Cannes during the festival has two distinct geographies: the public and the private. The public geography — the red carpet at the Palais, the Croisette, the beach restaurants open to anyone with a reservation — is what the cameras cover and what most visitors experience. It is spectacular, energetic, and largely irrelevant to the festival’s real business.
The private geography is considerably more interesting. It exists in the suites of the Carlton and the Martinez, where distribution deals are negotiated over breakfast, and production agreements are concluded over late drinks. It exists aboard the yachts anchored in the harbour, where the guest lists are carefully controlled and the conversations are not for publication. It exists in the private villas above the city, rented for the fortnight by studios, streaming platforms, and the kind of individuals who prefer their entertaining to occur without an audience.
Access to this private geography is not primarily a question of money, though money is necessary. It is a question of introduction — of being known to the people who arrange these evenings, or of arriving in the company of someone who is. The festival’s social world is, beneath its apparent openness, deeply networked, and the evenings that matter are almost invariably invitation-only. Understanding this, and acting on it with appropriate preparation is the difference between attending Cannes and experiencing it.
“The films are the occasion. The festival is the pretext. What it produces, in the evenings that follow the screenings and in the mornings that follow the evenings, is something considerably more interesting than any single film.”
THE CARLTON: STILL THE CORRECT ADDRESS
The Hotel Carlton InterContinental on the Croisette has been the centre of the festival’s social world since the 1950s, and the passage of seven decades has not materially altered this fact. Its position — directly on the Croisette, facing the sea, equidistant from the Palais des Festivals and the Martinez — makes it the natural gathering point for anyone who wishes to be in the centre of the festival’s circulation.
The terrace bar during festival week is among the most reliably interesting social environments in Europe in any given May: the collision of film industry figures, international press, business visitors, and the particular crowd that Cannes attracts from every tangentially related world creates an energy that is, at its best, genuinely electric. A table here on a Tuesday afternoon, with the right companion and sufficient patience, will produce more interesting encounters per hour than almost any other location on the Croisette.
Rooms at the Carlton during festival week require booking many months in advance, and the rates reflect both the demand and the position. The suites facing the sea are the correct choice if they are available; the view from a high floor at dawn, with the harbour visible below and the hills above Cannes catching the first light, is among the more quietly extraordinary experiences the Riviera offers. For those for whom the Carlton is no longer available — as it frequently is not by this point in the calendar — the Martinez to the east of the Palais is the correct alternative, its Art Deco interior and its private beach making it a serious rival for everything except the Carlton’s unmatched position at the festival’s social centre.
THE SCREENINGS: WHICH ONES MATTER AND HOW TO ATTEND THEM
The official screenings at the Palais des Festivals are divided into two categories: the evening premieres, which take place on the Grand Théâtre Lumière’s famous steps and constitute the festival’s most visible ritual; and the press and industry screenings, which occur throughout the day in the Palais’s various theatres and are attended by those who are actually there to watch films.
The evening premieres are social occasions as much as cinematic ones. Black tie is required; the red carpet is real, not metaphorical; and the combination of the setting, the dress, and the particular electricity of a significant premiere in the world’s most famous film festival creates an atmosphere that is, experienced from the right position, quite extraordinary. Tickets for the official screenings require accreditation or an invitation from the film’s producers or distributor; the most sought-after premieres — this year, those associated with the films in competition for the Palme d’Or — are allocated months in advance and are not available through conventional channels.
For those attending without formal industry accreditation, the Cinéma de la Plage — free outdoor screenings on the beach below the Palais, typically featuring classic films and special presentations — offers a genuinely pleasurable alternative. This year’s programme includes a midnight screening of The Fast and the Furious, which is either an incongruity or a perfect expression of Cannes’ particular genius for holding contradictions simultaneously, depending on your perspective.
THE HARBOUR: THE FESTIVAL’S OTHER STAGE
The harbour at Cannes during the festival is one of the great spectacles of the international year: a concentration of superyachts that is unmatched anywhere in the world outside of Monaco’s Grand Prix week, each vessel serving as a floating private venue for the studio, the platform, the production company, or the individual who has chartered it.
The yachts serve a function that no hotel can replicate: they provide a space that is entirely private, entirely controlled, and entirely separate from the city’s social geography while remaining, by water, minutes from everything. The breakfast meeting on a private deck; the dinner for ten with the harbour lights reflected in the water; the evening that begins at a premiere and continues, by tender, aboard a vessel that has been made ready for exactly this — these are the experiences that the harbour makes possible, and that constitute, for those who have them, the festival’s most complete pleasures.
Charter rates during festival week are significant, and availability is extremely limited by this stage of the calendar. For future years, the correct approach is to engage a serious charter broker — Burgess, Fraser, or Camper & Nicholsons among them — no later than the autumn before the festival. The vessels that are worth having in Cannes in May are committed by November at the latest.
“The harbour at Cannes during the festival is one of the great spectacles of the international year — a concentration of superyachts unmatched anywhere in the world outside Monaco’s Grand Prix week. Each vessel a private world.”
THE EVENINGS: WHERE THE FESTIVAL ACTUALLY HAPPENS
The evenings at Cannes during the festival are the point of the whole enterprise. The screenings end; the official events conclude; and what remains is the city itself, the restaurants, the private parties, the terraces, and the particular social energy that twelve days of concentrated international proximity generates.
La Palme d’Or at the Martinez — two Michelin stars, a dining room of considerable elegance, and a terrace that is among the finest tables on the Croisette — is the correct address for a significant dinner during festival week. Its kitchen, under chef Christian Sinicropi, produces food of genuine ambition; its position makes it the natural choice for the dinner that follows an important screening or precedes an important conversation. Book as far in advance as possible; the restaurant fills entirely for the festival’s duration.
For something less formal, the beach restaurants of the Croisette — particularly Tetou at Golfe-Juan, twenty minutes east along the coast, which has been serving bouillabaisse of exceptional quality since 1920 — offer an entirely different register: the long lunch that extends into the afternoon, the particular pleasure of excellent simple food in full sun beside the Mediterranean, the sense of having escaped the festival’s machinery without leaving its orbit.
The private parties that constitute the festival’s real social life are, by their nature, not listed anywhere. They occur in villas, on yachts, in private rooms at hotels, and in the various temporary venues that studios and platforms construct for the festival’s duration. Access to them is, as noted, a matter of introduction rather than money — and the best preparation for Cannes, in this respect, is the same as for any other occasion where the private world matters more than the public one: arriving in the right company.
ON COMPANY AT CANNES
Cannes during the festival is, above all else, a social occasion. Its pleasures — the terrace conversations, the late dinners, the evenings that begin at a premiere and end somewhere considerably more interesting — belong to more than one person. And the particular intensity of the festival’s social world, in which the normal pace of acquaintance is compressed and the encounters that might take months elsewhere can occur in a single evening, makes the quality of one’s company more consequential than in almost any other context.
The companion who makes Cannes extraordinary is someone who understands instinctively what the festival is and is not — who moves between its public and private geographies with ease, who can hold her own in the particular social world of the Croisette without either performing for it or being overwhelmed by it, and who brings to the evenings the kind of intelligence and warmth that makes the festival’s best encounters possible rather than merely attending them.
Harlingtons arranges introductions for Cannes during the festival period with the same care and the same standards that govern every introduction the agency makes. The companions available for the festival are women who are genuinely comfortable in this world — at a premiere, on a yacht, at a private dinner in a villa above the city, or simply on the Carlton terrace on a warm May evening watching the festival go by. Introductions can be arranged for a single evening, for the festival’s duration, or for any period in between.
The 79th festival closes on the 23rd of May. The Palme d’Or will be awarded. The yachts will begin to depart. The Carlton terrace will quiet by degrees. And the city — which is always beautiful, and which is only itself at this particular pitch for these particular twelve days — will begin the long exhale that follows. If you are there, be there properly. Enquiries to harlingtons.com, by telephone, or by WhatsApp. All arrangements in complete confidence.
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The Harlingtons Journal is published periodically for the agency’s clientele and friends. All introductions are arranged privately and handled with complete discretion.
