Cannes Food & Film Survey: From Palme to Pissaladière
Six attendees share the movies and meals that made—or ruined—their festival.
The Festival de Cannes wrapped up a week ago but I’m still grieving. It’ll be at least three months before I get to see their buzziest titles. (Catch you at the New York Film Festival!)
In the meantime, I asked six people who actually went—filmmakers, critics, and dedicated cinephiles—to share their thoughts about the films they watched and the food they ate. There was also a Wildcard space for random observations. Here’s what they had to report.
Survey responses are organized alphabetically by first name. Big thanks to everyone who contributed!
Dan Schindel, Freelance Critic
Check out Dan’s Substack, It’s Been Said, where he writes about arts & culture!
Best Movie: All of a Sudden [directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi] in a walk. No one else can craft extended conversations and speeches that make me feel so much like Martin Prince playing the “My Dinner with Andre” arcade game, entranced and slamming the joystick toward “Tell Me More.”
Worst Movie: Avedon, Ron Howard’s biographical doc about the titanic photographer. Whenever Avedon gets to say anything for himself in the archival portions, you see agonizing glimpses of the much better movie that could have been.
Best Meal: Gaeng Phed Ped Yang at Tuk Tuk Thai - roasted duck in red curry with coconut milk, lychees, and pineapple. Exquisite spiciness and flavor mix.
Worst Meal: I judge the quality of any breakfast spot by its eggs benedict, so a place literally called So Benedict sets a high bar—a bar that it smacked its head on, knocking itself out. Watery eggs, bland Hollandaise sauce, and overwhelmed by the spinach on the bun.
Fun fact: The French restaurants in Cannes fucking suck.
Wildcard: Al Charq is a fantastic spot for Lebanese takeaway. You get a ton of food on a tray; since the place is usually so busy during the festival, I recommend taking it to enjoy on a bench in the lovely little Fontaine Leduc park.
Lauren Brodauf, Content Creator & Host of Post Credits Café
Best Movie: A Girl Unknown, directed by Zou Jing.
Synopsis: “A Chinese girl is passed between three families from the age of 6 to 18, receiving each time a new name and identity. As she searches for belonging and the possibility of love, she has to navigate between the weight of her past and the uncertainty of her future, until she finds her own way.”
Heartbreaking, beautiful both visually and story wise. Just loved it.
This is why I go to film festivals. Not a single person I know saw this but I scored a ticket last minute and figured I might as well check it out. This film will be one of my top five of the year, I can confidently say. With these small titles, god knows if they’ll ever be picked up by a studio for distribution, and if they are, it’ll be a while until it gets a release date. By attending film festivals, you can watch these works of passion from these lesser known filmmakers before anyone else.
Worst Movie: I saw seven films and none of them were bad at all! I’d say my least favorite was Fatherland, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. I’ve never been a fan of wartime period pieces. Sandra Hüller an ICON though.
Best Meal: Not a meal, but a dessert from a restaurant called Rosana. I have gone here for their berry cheesecake slice each of my four years attending the festival. Yum.
Worst Meal: I do not even know the name of the restaurant, it was just one of those insanely overpriced spots by the Croisette. I had a burrata and peach salad with a balsamic dressing and never in my life have I been served a burrata that is so dry it gave me cottonmouth. (And I have had, in all seriousness, approximately 40 different burratas in my travels thus far in my life.)
Wildcard: Meeting my podcast parents, Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins of The Big Picture Podcast. We talked movies for fifteen mins and it was pure bliss. Also, attending the festival for the first time as a member of PRESS!! For my own interview show!!(??) So blessed, truly. (They also had free Nespresso for us..say less.)
Mark Asch, Freelance Critic
Best Movie: The Dreamed Adventure [directed by Valeska Grisebach]
Worst Movie: Sheep in the Box [directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda]
Best Meal: Pissaladière is a regional specialty consisting of flatbread coated in caramelized onions and topped with black olives and anchovies. I celebrate the end of the festival by enjoying one from one of the bakeries by the train station; if it wasn’t for the possibility that I might sit next to a respected colleague at a press screening, I’d eat it every day.
Worst Meal: If I’m writing between the 6 PM and 10 PM premieres, dinner is a baguette in the AirBnB that I certainly hope is less than 24 hours old.
Mimi, Mechanical Engineering Student from Munich
Best Movie: Coward [directed by Lukas Dhont]. The emotions!!
Worst Movie: The Unknown [directed by Arthur Harari]. I fell asleep.
Best Meal: After the Closing Ceremony, I got a Mojito ice cream from the shop next to the infamous Irish pub where everyone hangs after the festival!!
Honorable mention: The insane amount of plain baguettes I had everyday. And I managed to get Red Bull into the Lumière three times to counter my sleep deprivation!! And of course the countless free Nespresso cups in the Palais. (As you can tell, not much food but lots of caffeine.)
Best meal I saw on the screen: Chicken cordon bleu on the plane rides in John Travolta’s Propeller One-Way Night Coach.
I sat a few rows in front of Travolta during the premiere of his directing debut!! Prince Albert of Monaco was sitting right next to him and somehow he was the least important person in that theater. Nobody gave him any attention lol
Worst Meal: To cut costs we just cooked noodles with pesto everyday. So probably all the pasta and pesto 😭Also a Madeleine I snuck into the closing ceremony that almost got sniffed out by security…
Worst on-screen meal: The burgers in the opening scene of Sanguine 🤢
Wildcard: A friend of mine and I were invited to a film festival in Nevada by a very rich looking couple while waiting in line outside the Lumière. They even invited us to brunch at Dolce and Gabbana?? We sadly couldn’t attend but I still think they believed us to be way more important people than we actually are. (We were attending as members of our student cinema club.)
There’s also been a big scandal with Canal+ [a major French studio owned by a right-wing billionaire, which has threatened to blacklist 600 industry figures who signed an open letter critical of his political activities.] In almost any screening—though especially at the midnight ones—people were cheering on every studio logo. But when Canal+ appeared they were all booing while the cast and crew was present, there were also some “fascist!” screams and other French phrases that I didn’t get.
But best of all is always meeting old and new friends in Cannes :))
Other highlights: Being interviewed by Letterboxd and taking this big ass sign all the way home via Flixbus.
On attending the Closing Ceremony: I got a ticket just the day of and I didn’t really know what to expect.
There seemed to be way more security than at the usual screenings, and inside they provided water (fancy) in unbranded paper cups (not so fancy). You could also pick up an electronic translation device, which I conveniently lost in the first five minutes under the seat in front of me.
A girl in front of me bet €20 on Moulin winning the Palme d’Or, which had no prospects. She then bet more money on Minotaur which was doing numbers on Polymarket 😭😂 I still don’t know her thought process. [The Palme d’Or went to Fjord, while Minotaur attained the second place Grand Prix.]
Nicolas Mouren, Screenwriter at Stories We Tell
Best Movie: El Ser Querido by Rodrigo Sorogoyen.
There are many runner ups such as Coward by Lukas Dhont, Minotaur by Andrey Zvyagintsev, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun, and All of a Sudden by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
Worst Movie: Sanguine by Marion Le Corroller. Very kitsch, not my style.
Best Meal: Ciro’s on the Plage du Majestic
Worst Meal: Pitaya (5 rue du 24 aout)
Wildcard: Jim Queen by Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athané. Midnight Screening, the reaction from the audience was electric. It felt like a concert!
Sydney, Brand Strategist
I had no accreditation, so I just went with a hope and a dream and I was able to watch movies via two programs open to the public: the Cinéma de la Plage [free outdoor screenings on the beach] and the Quinzaine des Cinéastes [Director’s Fortnight].
Best Movie: Death Has No Master [directed by Jorge Thielen Armand]
Worst Movie: I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning [directed by Clio Barnard]. A hot take according to Letterboxd reviews. [This also won the Quinzaine des Cinéastes audience award.]
Best Meal: Steak at L’Atrium!
Wildcard: The raw yearning and desperation on display from the well-dressed people standing outside of the Palais des Festivals, holding signs and asking those who passed by for just one ticket to that night’s biggest screening. There is a lot of beauty and sincerity in that. (I saw the most signs for Hope and Fjord.)
At the festival, films are fighting to be seen, [while at the adjacent Marché du Film] they are fighting to be made—it was a treat to witness! I initially felt a bit silly traveling to the festival without an accreditation, but seeing that display made me feel like I was in the right place 🙂
In case you missed it, last year my buddy Byron attended the festival through the Three Days in Cannes accreditation, available to any movie fan between the ages of 18-28. Check out his dispatch:
This was such a great read, I love this concept!