Marché du Film — Festival de Cannes Transitions Annual Event to All-Virtual Using Zoom

Marché du Film — Festival de Cannes, the industry arm of the Cannes Film Festival, is one of the most important annual events for professionals across the global film industry. The market provides industry professionals with numerous business opportunities, reinforces international visibility, and serves as a gathering place for those looking to discover the latest innovations in a rapidly changing industry.

Each year, over 12,500 film industry professionals travel to Cannes to present and discover almost 4,000 films and projects in development at 33 screening venues, providing a marquee experience for attendees. But all of it was in jeopardy in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic impacted events throughout the world.

Taking Marché du Film virtual

The global outbreak of COVID-19 threatened to completely disrupt the Cannes Film Festival, and the Marché du Film —Festival de Cannes team needed to rethink how to offer its events.

“In 2020, the Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes was urged to take an unprecedented decision to completely convert its physical program normally taking place in Cannes into an all-virtual online event due to the COVID-19 virus,” said Jérôme Paillard, the Executive Director of the Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes. “To make our activities happen, a number of dedicated tools of virtual communication were necessary. This was a new need for our event.”

Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes wanted to use a video conferencing platform to host its events over the course of the film festival. However, the organization needed a solution that could match the high standards of the Cannes Film Festival but still provide a simplified experience.

“We wanted to have an automatic authentication system for our users, a seamless management for the speakers, as well as an automatic control of the number of participants admitted to a group meeting,” Paillard said.

Hosting dynamic, engaging roundtables with Zoom

In their search for a solution that could support a professional online event experience, the teams at Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes chose Zoom based on its robust feature set, unrivaled flexibility, and scalable architecture.

“What specifically attracted us about Zoom’s solutions was the flexibility and the diversity of available integrated features,” Paillard said. “The possibility of embedding the chosen tool into our platform was one of our primary requirements when looking for the best solution. Zoom’s fantastic API and SDK libraries were among the key elements that made us opt for Zoom.”

Paillard listed several other Zoom features that were important to the experience, including the ability to organize events in meeting and webinar formats, the ability to accommodate a large number of panelists and attendees, screen sharing, the language interpretation tool, HD recording, and streaming capabilities.

“The customized live streaming on social networks was very important to improving the user experience,” Paillard added.

The Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes team leveraged Zoom for internal communication surrounding the event, but also for collaborative meetings where groups of speakers could host live discussions and debates, providing an intimate outlet for industry professionals to share ideas. Organizers also used Zoom Webinars but to host engaging online conferences, which included panel discussions and keynote speeches from film professionals. The audience could interact with the speakers through the Q&A feature.

Supporting future events

Zoom helped the Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes team to continue supporting the film industry during the pandemic, providing a user-friendly platform that allowed them to host important discussions among industry professionals, and support internal communication and collaboration. Zoom could continue to play an important role in the Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes’ events.