Actress Josette Day presents the Film "Beauty and the Beast" directed by Jean Cocteau at the first Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France in 1946.
Cannes, France: The Cannes Film Festival opens this week in the French Riviera resort. Here are five essential, and often surprising, facts about the glitzy Mediterranean town.
1. Bad timing
Timing is everything in cinema, they say, but as Cannes was to prove that's not always the case. France's great reforming education minister Jean Zay first came up with the idea of a global international film festival in 1939 as a rival to the Venice festival, which was then the plaything of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his film-loving German friend Adolf Hitler.
Biarritz on France's Atlantic coast was first chosen as the host city but when it couldn't raise the money, Cannes nipped in. However, war soon broke out and Mussolini's troops marched into the town.
It wasn't till after the war in 1946 that the festival finally got going, quickly becoming the most important in the world.
Unfortunately by then Zay was dead, murdered because he was a Jew by France's collaborationist government. His ashes were moved to the Pantheon in Paris last year as one of the leading heroes of the French Resistance.
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