Cannes Film Festival 2021 begins at French Riviera. Leo Carax's Annette to open

The 74th edition of Cannes Film Festival finally began at the French Riviera on July 6, after a delay of two months. Last year, the festival was cancelled due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The Palais des Festivals, the central hub of the Cannes Film Festival, a massive bulwark of filmmaker-named halls and pristine movie screens, is about as close as you can get to a cinema temple. To enter, you must ascend red-carpeted steps. But in the past 16 months, Cannes’ Palais hasn’t been home to the movie frenzy it hosts annually. Last year’s festival was postponed, then cancelled. The Palais, instead, was lined with hospital beds in the early months of the pandemic. Earlier this year, it was turned into a mass-vaccination “Vaccinodrome.”