The First Cannes Film Festival Opens After the War

On September 20, 1946, the first Cannes International Film Festival opened its doors at the former Casino of Cannes, bringing together nineteen countries in competition, according to the festival's official history, to showcase their cinema. The gathering marked the realization of a project that had been brutally interrupted seven years earlier by the outbreak of the Second World War. The festival's origins reached back to 1938, conceived primarily as a democratic counterweight to the Venice Film Festival, which had fallen under open fascist manipulation.

Venice was then the only international film festival in existence, but political interference had steadily eroded its credibility. In 1937, Benito Mussolini intervened to prevent the French pacifist work La Grande Illusion from winning. The breaking point arrived the following year, when, under pressure from Adolf Hitler, the top prize went to the Italian war film Luciano Serra, Pilot and to Olympia, a German documentary produced in association with the Nazi Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda despite festival rules disqualifying documentaries. Indignant British, French, and American jurors withdrew from the event with the intention of never returning.