Canneseries Festival to Remain Standalone Event in Spring Without MipTV; Canal+ to Return as Sponsor
While MipTV is relocating to London with a revamped format, Canneseries Festival is sticking to its guns and will remain as a standalone event in the spring on the Croisette.
Benoit Louvet, the managing director of Canneseries, told Variety in an exclusive interview that the festival will return in 2025 on April 22-27 with its major partners, the city of Cannes, the region PACA and the Vivendi-owned pay TV group Canal+. The sixth edition, which wrapped on April 10, hosted the world premieres of highly anticipated international shows including Disney+’s “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld” and AppleTV+’s “Franklin,” with big stars such as Daniel Bruhl and Michael Douglas on the ground.
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Canneseries has run alongside MipTV since its inception in 2019, and experimented as a standalone event once before, in the fall of 2020 after MipTV was canceled due to the pandemic.
When MipTV organizer RX France announced its decision to move to London, many in the industry expected Canneseries to move to the fall in order to run alongside Mipcom, which is still considered a key TV market. But Louvet said it wouldn’t have been feasible for Canneseries to take place simultaneously.
“We studied the possibility of moving to October to run in parallel with Mipcom, but it didn’t make sense because both Mipcom and Canneseries are planning to expand significantly in 2025 and are looking to use the same venues inside the Palais des Festivals,” Louvet said. “With Mip moving to London, Mipcom is bound to get much bigger, and we also have large ambitions.”
In principle, festivals benefit from being tied to markets by building some industry presence and momentum around world premiere screenings and reviews — as is the case with Cannes Film Festival and its Marché du Film. But in the case of Canneseries, the festival doesn’t necessarily need a market as most shows premiering have already been financed and pre-sold around the world or ordered by streamers. And Mipcom, unlike the Marché du Film, uses screening venues for keynotes and panels, as well as premieres.
Canneseries is also preparing to ramp up its industry sidebar in 2025, Louvet said, pointing to the success of the Cannes Connections program which just held its fifth edition and brought together up-and-coming screenwriters and established producers. The executive said Cannes Connections will expand but remain a boutique event focusing on networking rather than a sales market.
Since its launch, Canneseries has been pitted against a rival festival, Series Mania, which also takes place in the spring in Northern France and has a budget twice as big (approximately €8.5 million). But Louvet argues there’s room for both festivals to co-exist and thrive.
“There are so many different film festivals so there’s no reason why we can’t have two, or even three TV festivals,” he says. “We have a different positioning, we’re open to the public, we have a selection that’s more international and a larger emphasis on glamor because we’re in Cannes.”
MipLondon, meanwhile, will kick off its inaugural edition alongside Content London on Feb. 24-27 with a pre-opening on the 23. Mipcom will take place this fall in Cannes on Oct. 21-24.
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