Some assignments you never forget. Following the team of a film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival is one of them. When that film leaves with the Caméra d’Or, the award for the best first feature across all selections, the assignment becomes a studio memory.
One team, one film, two weeks
This year, BOW Creative Studio spent 4 days alongside the team of Ben’imana, selected in the Un Certain Regard category: the preparations before each red-carpet walk, then the walk itself. The setup covered every front, a session of interviews for Gabonese television, brand-activation reels and immersive vlogs, and photos showcasing the outfits and art direction of each evening. The red-carpet walks were even captured from a vantage point almost impossible to get on the carpet.
We followed director Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo, producer Samantha Biffot, the film’s lead actress, and Samson Elibigui, director of IGIS, the Gabonese Institute of Image and Sound, closely. It’s a project that also tells a bigger story: a new generation of African cinema taking its place on the world’s biggest stage.
One of the videos produced during the festival:
Social content at a festival: a sprint that lasts two weeks
Covering a film team at Cannes is nothing like a conventional shoot. The schedule changes by the hour, capture windows sometimes last a few minutes, and every piece has to be edited, approved and published while the moment is still hot.
In practice, our setup came down to three principles:
- An agile, mobile crew, able to follow the film team everywhere, from the palais to the beaches, without ever slowing it down.
- Daily editing, the day’s footage published the same day, designed for the codes of social media rather than as making-of clips.
- Writing in the present tense, no fixed comms plan: the content adapts to whatever the festival decides. A selection, a standing ovation, an award.
And then the Caméra d’Or
When the name Ben’imana was announced, the content wrote itself, you just had to be there, in the right place, camera ready. That’s exactly the job: being prepared enough for the unexpected to become an image.
Congratulating a team you’ve followed day after day is also a way to measure what social content brings to a film at this level of competition: a public existence that begins before the theatrical release, a community built during the festival, and archive footage that already holds historical value.
Planning for Cannes?
BOW Creative Studio is based in Cannes year-round. Cannes Film Festival, Cannes Lions, TFWA, conferences at the Palais des Festivals: if your team, your brand or your delegation needs visuals during a major Cannes event, let’s talk, we know the ground like no one else.