Power Cut Plunges Southern France into Darkness, Cannes Festival Goes Ahead
A widespread electricity outage has hit the Alpes-Maritimes region, including the host city of the Cannes Film Festival, just hours before its closing ceremony, following a similar major blackout across parts of Europe last month
A significant power cut plunged parts of southern France into darkness on Saturday, including the renowned city of Cannes, which is currently hosting its annual film festival.
The widespread outage struck just hours before the festival's highly anticipated closing ceremony.
The local French authority for the Alpes-Maritimes region confirmed a major electricity outage affecting the area.
RTE, France's electricity transmission system operator, stated it was working to restore power, Reuters reported.
This incident follows a major power outage last month that left millions in Spain, Portugal, and several parts of France without electricity. Spain's Prime Minister at the time attributed that widespread blackout to an issue within Europe's grid, causing massive disruptions, grounding planes, and forcing hospitals to suspend routine operations.
Emergency services and rail workers in Spain were required to evacuate approximately 35,000 people from over 100 trains that ceased operations when the power was cut.
France Info radio later reported that today's outage in the Alpes-Maritimes region impacted some 160,000 households and was caused by the fall of a power line.
The blackout struck Cannes itself at around 10:00 AM local time, plunging shops and restaurants into darkness. On-the-ground reports described widespread disruption, with businesses only able to accept cash payments.
Securing cash, however, proved challenging as ATMs were also offline.
Traffic lights ceased functioning, leading to road snarl-ups, and internet connectivity was impacted, causing popular apps like WhatsApp to go offline intermittently.
Festival's Resilience Amidst Chaos
Despite the extensive power failure, the Cannes Film Festival confirmed its closing ceremony on Saturday evening would proceed as planned.
The Palais des Festivals, the main venue, swiftly switched to an independent power supply, ensuring all scheduled events and screenings, including the pivotal awards ceremony, could continue under normal conditions.
A festival representative told Variety that "the Palais des Festivals has switched to an independent power supply, allowing all scheduled events and screenings, including the Closing Ceremony, to proceed as planned and under normal conditions." However, screenings at the Cineum were temporarily suspended, with plans to resume once power is restored.
Even earlier in the day, the press conference for Kelly Reichardt's 'Mastermind', featuring the director and cast members Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal, went ahead as planned at 10:15 AM local time, with lights on at the Palais thanks to generators.
Several large hotels along the Croisette also maintained power via their own generators, though the duration of their supply remained unclear.
Jury president Juliette Binoche, along with jury members Halle Berry, Jeremy Strong, Payal Kapadia, Hong Sang-soo, Alba Rohrwacher, Leïla Slimani, Dieudo Hamadi, and Carlos Reygadas, are due to hand out the festival’s top awards at the ceremony, set to begin at 6:40 PM CET.
