What am I doing here?

At one in the morning – Thursday moving into Friday – I am walking the Croisette the sidewalk that runs along the beach and provides access to all the private parties happening under tents that belch light and dance music.

“Hugh!” I hear someone call. It is not always the case that the “You…” someone is shouting to someone else ends up being me – but in this case, I look up and see Patrice, a Frenchman living in Ireland. I had met him at a film festival one year ago. He’s dressed in a tux as well and introduces me to a Irish filmmaker he is working with.

It’s hard to describe the unsettling feeling of being far away from home and hearing someone call out to you. We've all felt it but as much as it is reassuring there's always something unsettling of seeing a familiar face in a very unfamiliar place. (The strangest was a brief side-trip I took to Berlin on a business trip to see partial eclipse of the sun. After sitting through that eerily unsettling event in the shadow of the city’s gold angel at the Victory Column. As the sun returned and sky brightened again, I was walking to the Brandenburg Gate when someone called out my name. I was so disoriented by it I completely spaced the woman’s name for the next five minutes….)

Granted I should not be completely surprised, Patrice and I had exchanged a few emails in the year since we first met and I knew he was coming to Cannes. But he had originally planned on coming for just the first few days…. He was, he told me with a broad grin, extending his stay because he had “met some very interesting people.”

In some ways, Patrice is more than a sight for sore eyes in a city of unfamiliar faces, but a validation of why I am here making further connections. A bit too slowly and incrementally it seems but to quote a line from a short film by a Hungarian filmmaker I had met just that afternoon: “Usually what we long for is right outside our comfort zone.”

Stacey the Producer and I had spent the morning and early afternoon preparing 15 packets for short film buyers who work for European distributors. Patrice, who is here trying to find companies interested in investing in a Irish film which Martin Sheen is said to be attached to, tells me that a Russian distributor has been showing an interest in shorts from the U.S. and Western Europe. He quotes a price per minute on what the standard rate for a short is and I frown a bit in disbelief. “Really?”

“Yes, yes! You should talk to them.” And then he is off to another party. Patrice is a hummingbird, hovering a bit to savor the conversation, then moving quickly on. Blink and he's gone.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t here to enjoy a first glimpse of amazing films from around the world, to experience the Pavilion red carpet, or find myself walking up the gangplank to a yacht docked in the bay (more on that later). But getting more people to see “Credits” with the outside chance of finding someone interested in the feature script I’ve got in my suitcase or any other mutually beneficial working relationship is why I am here.

Strangely though, the random conversation you strike up in a café, an elevator or a hotel lobby can be just as effective and fruitful as the carefully calculated campaign of meetings and personally written notes to a list of buyers.