There are lots of articles and resources that help first time visitors to the Cannes film festival.  There are innumerable blogs.  The nice people at Raindance made some pretty smart short films which show you how to navigate around and what to expect.   Worth a look if you have a moment.  

But few of the blogs or smart guides really prepare the market visitor for the complete madness that afflicts producers, writers, actors, musicians, editors, etc., once there.  

It's called THE MEETING.  

Independent film producers (or musicians, or writers, or editors, or aspirant directors) wait endlessly on plastic chairs in the UK Pavilion, or Canadian, or South African, or - you get the idea, for a MEETING.  Those willing to fork out $100 get to sit on similar plastic in the American Pavilion, but are waited on by ENDLESSLY enthusiastic interns who serve diet coke in EUROS (how exotic!).  All fun so far.  

But, how do you get a meeting?

Firstly, there's THE BOOK, or rather the rather clunky sounding "Marche du Film 2011, The Guide".  This weighty tome lists everyone in the market, you might want to have a meeting with.  It causes shoulder injuries it's so heavy and quite a brisk after sales market itself on eBay.  Upon receipt, you spend half a day with yellow highlighter pen and those 'lawyers' tabs noting everyone you could possible want to meet and then ring or e-mail them all.  Of course, you were supposed to do this online three weeks before the festival, but you like everyone else have been so busy making films, or writing, or creating music that you never got round to it.

The film market has a rather smart iPhone App version of the book called Cinando, where you can download a hazy picture of the person you have booked a meeting with.  You then suffer posture problems and neck injuries forever craning round, backwards and forwards across a crowded pavilion for someone in "jeans, t-shirt, with goatee beard" (not always, but typically that look does feature a lot on Cinando) in case that person obviously looking lost is YOUR MEETING.  

In a busier, more buoyant market, we discovered a real phenomenon this year - the booked, confirmed, nailed-on certain meeting that does not show.  It is rather quaintly called being Cannked. 

Just when you thought you had that Sales Agent buzzing about your one-sheet, the guy never shows.  You've been Cannked.  It could of course a simple error, a bus that was late, or another meeting that over-ran - but you've still been Cannked.  You can nonchalantly sip on the diet Coke and hit Cinando for another option.  You could even - walk up and say hello to someone...but hey no, back to the e-mails, the text messages.  

My personal view is that three Cannkes and you should be kicked out of the market.  It costs several hundred pounds to get in the market and to be Cannked is a humiliation no one, however big or small their role in the film business should have to endure.  This is not widget selling, or an insurance conference.  We are not selling banking products or property time-share; the attendees are creating, shaping and selling dreams; painting with light and sound and words.  No one should be Cannked in such a market.  So I know you have never done it, or even been tempted to 'no show' on the meeting you merrily confirmed just 48 hours before.  But if you were ever tempted, did you know you could be quickly badged online, in the market and on Twitter as a complete Cannker?

Of course, I've never actually had a meeting no-show.  Not at nine in the morning.  

No, not me...