Tales from the red carpet

This year’s 60th Anniversary Cannes film festival Palme d’Or went to the young Romanian film director Cristian Mungiu, for his film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Mungiu’s second film to make it to Cannes, was one of around twenty feature films in competition for the 2007 Palme d’Or.

In addition to the official competition trophies, a number of other prizes were awarded to various other films which were presented during this Festival.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was one of the two films that I saw during my trip to Cannes (the other one was My Blueberry Nights) and while I fully agree that it was thought provoking and educational, I also found it a bit too graphic for my liking. None-the-less, Cristian Mungiu has certainly shown what he is capable of in this film, so no doubt we will be seeing more from him in the future.

In his comments during the closing ceremony and today’s press conference for winners, Cristian Mungiu talks about what receiving the Palme d’Or means for the Romanian film industry, for film makers in other small countries around the world and for the successful distribution of this film.

Congratulations to Cristian and the entire cast on winnig the Palme d’Or!

So you may have noticed that things have been a little quiet on my end. Well I am now back home from Cannes and seeing things from the spectators side of the fence! Luckily, my colleagues have promised to keep us updated with what is happening in Cannes.

I still have lots of red carpet and other photos that I am sure you would like to see, so as things start to come to a close in Cannes, I though I had better get these photos posted quickly. Here are a few of them.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to hear which film picks up the famous Golden Palm!

Greetings from a very hot and muggy Cannes.

I arrived here on Tuesday of this week with a full agenda made up of a press conference and meetings with customers, influencers and channel partners. All this within the glamour and the glitz of the Film Festival. A really fascinating place and a head turning experience — stars everywhere you look. But the most important star for us here in Cannes is Petra Nemcova. Petra, an international philanthropist and top model, is starring in our most recent Personal Again video clip and she spent some of her busy schedule here in Cannes with the PSG team to talk about her Happy Hearts Fund. This fund was created early in 2005, with a mission to aid children that are victims of natural disasters as well as health and economic calamities. I cannot help but admire her both for her beauty and the good work she is bringing to children through her philanthropic efforts. She is a typical example of the type of personality HP wants to be associated with as she embodies both an achiever spirit and an understanding of technology.

I was lucky to be able to spend some time and find out what it’s like to be a super star, as I joined her on her photo shoot following the press conference. What a different type of job to that of managing the personal computing business, but it’s also a very tough one and I’m not sure it’s something I’d like to do every day.

We arranged for a private viewing of Shrek the Third for our customers and journalists yesterday. It is amazing to see how, with the aid of technology, these animated figures come close to human beings. The HP/Dreamworks relationship remains very strong, and thanks to our technology and their creative artists they have come up trumps once again with a tremendous movie. Don’t miss it when it comes out in Europe later this summer.

This morning I took some influential customers to meet with Ugo Conti, the inventor and designer of Proteus, the PSG sponsored avant-garde boat named after an early seagod. We took the boat out to go through its manoeuvers. What an incredible experience. Ugo allowed me to take the controls and standing high above the sea and racing along at around 25 knots you really feel the boat move beneath you. At the very end of the trip, a local film crew in a zodiac passed right under the boat. This must be the only boat in the world that allows for another boat to sail underneath it.

Eric

This week in Cannes has already been full of interesting and exciting events for the PSG team. Let me start by telling you about this year’s PSG advertising campaign. Based on the entertainment world, with the title “Your Life is the Show”, in bold bright colours, it’s difficult to miss as you walk along the Croisette. We have no less than three buildings draped with our co-advertising with AMD. As you drive out of Nice airport, you are immediately met with the posters with the special advertising developed for Cannes.

Walking along the Croisette, free copies of Metro Magazine are handed out each day. You can see people reading them as they wander around Cannes — again the back cover of each issue announces the campaign. The Riviera Times, a special magazine which comes out on the Cote d’Azur in four languages has a fly cover dedicated to the campaign, plus a four page pullout around “Your Life is the Show”. As the Monaco Grand Prix takes place this weekend on the back end of the Film Festival, we end up with a double bang for our bucks!!

Looking out over Cannes Harbour a weird spider looking creature with a pointing finger stands out on the skyline. This is the Proteus boat. Proteus has made its debut in Cannes. To quote the designers it is the first full-size WAM-V™ (Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel). (How’s that for a mouthful !!) the design and manufacturing of the boat have been facilitated by HP computers and peripherals. I met Isabella and Ugo the couple who designed the boat. They have been working for five years to create this prototype which is aerodynamic brings a totally new seagoing experience to sailors and voyagers alike. Low energy consumption and an ultra light flexible modular design, it is designed for applications ranging from rescue missions to sea explorations. After spending the next month along the Italian coast it will then sail to new york, a trip that can take from between five to ten days. The boat has four bunks and the crew can sleep aboard in relative comfort. The floaters are filled with fuel for the trip across the ocean. I think it should be an exciting experience.

luciana

On Wednesday night Cannes hosted the probably most highly prized event of the whole festival: amfAR: the Cinema against AIDS dinner 2007.

The aim of the dinner is to host a big auction to benefit the amfAR, the American foundation for Aids Research; one of the world’s leading non-profit organizations dedicated to the support of AIDS research, HIV prevention, treatment education, and the advocacy of sound AIDS-related public policy.

Names like Kenneth Cole, Elisabeth Taylor, Sharon Stone are only a few of the personalities actively involved in the foundation and the ambassadors of the program across the world.

For the second year, under the leadership and direct involvement of our PSG Marketing Senior VP, Satjiv Chahil, HP co-sponsored the dinner and the auction.

We are very proud to be part of such a project and to have contributed to the results of the evening. The auction, directly managed by Sharon Stone and with the support of a group of artists (George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia, Petra Nemcova, Roberto Cavalli…) raised 7.5M$, beating the absolute record in the history of the foundation.

Satjiv and all of us, were very honored to host Paolo Coelho, the famous book writer, at the HP table. We had the privilege to meet thanks to his participation in the “Personal Again Campaign”. Paolo Coelho, an enthusiastic supporter of HP, accepted to be one of the personalities featured in one of the PSG TV spots we will broadcast during the back to school and Christmas campaigns across the world.

luciana

After one year, here we are in Cannes with the PSG team for another step in the process of taking the PSG brand image to a higher level. We started our journey last year here in Cannes with the launch of the “personal again campaign” and a press conference and, despite the fact we still have some work to do to be recognized as a fashion brand, to be appealing to the young generation and to achieve the level of awareness we should have, we have gone a long way since then.
This year, with the partnership of AMD, we organized three events in Cannes:
- a press conference around the theme of “your life is a show”
- a customer hospitality event (with French, European and WW customers and influencers)
- a partner event.

Yesterday, Wednesday 23rd, it was the press day.
We had around 50 journalists from all around Europe covering 21 countries (with an excellent representation of the CEE and MEMA region) IT specialized press, business press and people press.
During the press conference, Satjiv Chahil, the PSG Senior VP of Marketing, explained the PSG marketing strategy and the future plans and the PSG strategy in the digital entertainment market.
He also introduced the PSG sponsorship of the “Petra Nemcova’s Happy Hearts initiative”.
This partnership is an extension of Nemcova’s Happy Hearts Fund (HHF), created in early 2005, with a mission to aid children that are victims of natural disasters as well as health and economic calamities. This initiative is yet another example of how technology is being used to develop social interaction across borders, be they geographically, politically or even socially entrenched, can be a federating and educational tool. Further extending their relationship, HP is announcing that Petra Nemcova is the latest global achiever to join the company’s award-winning marketing campaign, “The Computer is Personal Again.”

Eric Cador shared the PSG success story and the challenges ahead, Achim Kuttler introduced the two new consumer products: the Dragon, the 20 inch super duper Notebook and the HP media Smart and the home server everybody would like to have at home to store pictures, videos, music….

After that we took the journalists to dinner and to a “red carpet” screening….
I’ll tell you more tomorrow….

luciana

As promised, here’s a bit more on my trip to Cannes…

Last Friday evening I met with our Managing Director from Slovakia. He had invited two of his top accounts and from our discussion I believe that everybody really enjoyed themselves tremendously. Cannes is such a great platform to host our most valued customers - I am sure Peter would agree.

It was also my pleasure to spend time with the two lucky HP employees and their spouses who won our blogging competition this year and we had a wonderful time in Cannes - Susan, Tim, Joanne and Mark enjoyed a welcome lunch at the beach, before being whisked away to HP’s wireless lounge to blog on their first impressions of Cannes.

Finally and most importantly - they went up the red carpet to watch what we expected to be a light hearted French musical. I think the carpet experience with the hundreds of photographers by our side was quite “something” to experience for all of us - the movie was not as easily digestible as the excellent food we were served at a wonderful dinner at the Hotel Majestic that evening. The film was called “chanson l’amour” and will open in France next week -not sure it will come to all of your countries - but check it out for yourself. Here is a photo that Amir took during the chanson l’amour photo call.

The next evening I also got to see Michael Moore’s latest film SICKO - which was very well received by the Cannes audience. Moore describes the shortcomings of the US health (and to some degree education) system and compares it with the much better services citizens receive in countries like Canada, France, the UK or even in Cuba. Whilst he picked a very important subject and is making a lot of good points, I was a bit disappointed in the way this film described everything as black and white - we all know that our welfare system in many European countries is under threat and that some of the labor laws we have in Europe hinder our overall productivity and keep companies from investing here….so Michael should have been somewhat more objective to give more credibility to his film. But again, he is Michael Moore and he has to be provocative - so I guess the film will stir a lot of good and necessary discussions and this is his intent in the first place. In the US he is already facing huge opposition from the government and we heard that it is unclear whether the movie will actually be released on schedule…maybe another PR stunt..who knows these days.

Anyway, overall it was a fabulous weekend with plenty of entertainment, good discussions, “interesting films” and fabulous people. I hope we can run yet another employee scheme next year to share this experience with lucky winners in 2008!

It was quite a sight on the Cannes Croisette yesterday, as I was walking up to the HP Studio, I was overtaken by a man on a Segway (those nifty, electric chariot type things).

His uniform stood out in the crowd not least because it was sporting the HP logo. A bit further on I spotted him giving film fans and shoppers alike a firsthand look at some of HP’s exciting notebook and IPAQs.

People got close up to HP’s smart phone, the iPAQ 514 Voice Messenger, its travel companion the HP iPAQ rx5940 and the HP Pavilion tx1000 – our hottest new consumer notebook. They even had a chance to win an iPAQ!!

Five minutes later I saw someone else on one of the Segways with a similar box of goodies. The computer is personal again, ran the line on his uniform. You’re telling me. You couldn’t get more personal – and mobile if you tried!

Our trip to Cannes was over all too quickly, but on reflection it’s remarkable how much we managed to pack into our visit.

John Boorman famously commented that film making is the process of turning money into light and then back into money again, and the whole process was clearly on display in and around the Palais des Festivals.

The experience of making our way along the red carpet, flanked on both sides by masses of photographers, and then up the steps into the Palais itself is something that I will long remember. However I do not think that the film we saw, Les Chansons d’Amour, will lodge itself in my memory in the same way as other films shown at Cannes have done. I would rank The Piano, sex lies and videotape, Farenheit 911 and The Pianist as great films that I would be happy to watch again and again. Apparently the French press loved Les Chansons d’Amour, and have commented particularly on its witty songs, but for those of us who are not fluent French speakers I guess that the wit got lost in translation.

Meanwhile the money side of Cannes was in full view in the Marche, which was situated behind the Palais but discretely hidden from view for those on the red carpet. I spent some time after lunch walking through the Marche’s maze of halls that were full of people trying to raise money to make films or sell the distribution rights to any number of films, some of which might even exist. I was there as an observer rather than as a buyer or a seller, and perhaps it showed, as no one asked me what country I was buying for.

After this I was glad to escape back into the sunshine of the Croisette and the HP sponsored exhibition of photographs of stars from previous festivals, a brilliant reminder of the wonderful artistic heritage of Cannes.

So I hear you want to see more stars….. well here they are. These shots and many of the other star shots were taken by Amir our star photographer, who has 19 years of red carpet experience (in fact, he even has his own photographer’s spot on the red carpet) . It was taken yesterday at the photo call with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, who are here for the debut of A Mighty Heart, a film by Michael Winterbottom about Mariane Pearl, the 39-year-old widow of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan five years ago. The Globeandmail.com does a good write up of the press conference.