Cannes Film Festival postponed until July

The Cannes Film Festival’s organizers announced that the annual star-studded event has been postponed until July, after having to cancel it entirely last year due to the raging coronavirus pandemic.

Organizers stated the event would now take place from July 6-17, The Associated Press reports. The event has taken place with relatively few interruptions for more than 70 years, the AP notes, and organizers are hoping the pandemic will have died down enough by July to allow the festival to take place once again.

The AP notes that if the Cannes Film Festival is successful, it will be the first major film festival to make a return since the Venice Film Festival in September, which required visitors to wear masks and socially distance on red carpets.

The Palais des Festivals, the main hub for Cannes, has recently been used for hospital beds and as a vaccination center, the AP reports.

If the international film festival is successful in its endeavor, it could bode well for the film industry which has been ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic.

In October, a group of high-profile film directors such as Clint Eastwood and Sofia Coppola signed a letter sent to Congress, asking that assistance be provided to movie theaters. The letter claimed that 90 percent of movie theaters had experienced 75 percent in losses in the second quarter of 2020.