Cannes Film Festival

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Lore & Background

Cannes was chosen for its touristic appeal and because its city hall offered financial support and a dedicated venue. The first festival was scheduled for 1939, with Hollywood stars arriving via an MGM-chartered ocean liner, but was cancelled after the opening night gala due to the outbreak of World War II.

Reader's Guide

The Cannes Film Festival was relaunched in 1946, with 21 countries presenting films at the former Casino of Cannes. It was not held in 1948 and 1950 due to budgetary problems. In 1949, the Palais des Festivals was constructed, and in 1951 the festival moved to spring to avoid competition with Venice. The 1950s saw the creation of the Critics' Prize, the Special Jury Prize (1954), and the Palme d'Or (1955). The Marché du Film was founded in 1959, becoming the first international platform for film commerce. In 1998, the Cinéfondation was created to support new filmmakers. The festival officially adopted the name Festival de Cannes in 2002.

Did You Know?

• The festival was originally scheduled for 1939 but was cancelled due to the outbreak of World War II.
• The Palme d'Or was created in 1955, replacing the Grand Prix du Festival.
• In 1965, Olivia de Havilland became the first female president of the jury.
• The 1968 festival was halted on 19 May when filmmakers interrupted projections in solidarity with striking students and workers.

A Wordless World of Rising Waters

The film follows a dark grey cat navigating a world where water is relentlessly rising, swallowing forests, cities, and everything in its path. There is no spoken language anywhere in the picture—Zilbalodis built the entire narrative through visual storytelling, animal behavior, and environmental cues. The cat's journey begins in a forest where a pack of dogs chases it over a stolen fish, only for a deer stampede and a massive flood to scatter everyone. From that point, the cat drifts from one temporary refuge to the next: an abandoned cabin with wooden cat sculptures, a sailboat carrying a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur, a yellow Labrador, and eventually a wounded secretarybird. The crew encounters hostile flocks, rescues stranded dogs from a bell tower, and sails through towering stone pillars during a violent storm. The film's emotional core rests on quiet moments of connection—comforting a beached whale, sharing a glass float to stay afloat—while the mystery of those ancient pillars and a gravity-defying portal remains deliberately unresolved.

Five and a Half Years Without a Single Storyboard

What began as a 2012 short called Aqua—a small cat conquering its fear of the sea—grew into a full-length feature that consumed five and a half years of production starting in 2019. Zilbalodis made a deliberate technical switch that year, abandoning Maya in favor of Blender, drawn to its real-time rendering engine EEVEE. The co-production brought together Latvian, French, and Belgian partners, with Take Five and Sacrebleu Productions joining in 2022 to handle character animation and sound design. Perhaps most striking is the absence of traditional pre-visualization: no storyboards were ever drawn. Instead, Zilbalodis dropped his animal characters directly into the 3D environment and explored them with a virtual camera, letting the composition emerge organically. He has cited Jacques Tati's wordless physical comedy and the anime series Future Boy Conan as key creative touchstones. The result is a film with no deleted scenes—every frame that survived the five-and-a-half-year process made it into the final cut.

Cannes Debut and a Record-Shattering Home Run

Flow made its world debut on 22 May 2024 in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, a slot that has long championed bold, auteur-driven work outside the main competition. The film's wordless, animal-driven narrative felt like a natural fit for that section's appetite for singular vision. Following its Cannes screening, the picture opened in Latvian theaters on 29 August 2024 and immediately shattered domestic expectations. It went on to break multiple Latvian box-office records and ultimately became the most-viewed film ever shown in a Latvian cinema—a remarkable achievement for an independent animated feature with no dialogue and no star power. The critical response was overwhelmingly positive, with reviewers praising the film's fluid animation, its emotional restraint, and the way it communicated an entire post-apocalyptic saga without a single line of spoken language. The Cannes premiere effectively launched what would become a historic awards season for both the film and for Latvian cinema as a whole.

Latvia's First Oscar and a National Treasure

At the 97th Academy Awards, Flow achieved a historic double: it won the Best Animated Feature Oscar and simultaneously received a nomination for Best International Feature Film as Latvia's official submission. This made it the first film from Latvia ever to earn an Academy Award nomination, let alone a win, in any category. The film also took home the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film, cementing its status as one of the year's most celebrated pictures. Both the Oscar statuette and the Golden Globe trophy were placed on public display at the Latvian National Museum of Art, a gesture that underscored how the film's success transcended the entertainment industry and became a matter of national pride. For a small Baltic country, having an independent, dialogue-free animated feature made largely with open-source software stand atop the global awards circuit represented a cultural milestone that few could have predicted when production began in 2019.