Mark Leiren-Young got much more than he bargained for just hours after arriving in Cannes for the Mipcom International TV sales conference on Saturday, when the equivalent of two months rain fell on one night.
“It was pretty surreal. It was ‘did-somebody-just-throw-a-bucket-on-my-head?’ kind of rain,” recalled the Victoria-based writer and filmmaker, relishing the calm after the storm while strolling a sunnier Riviera Monday.
He was recalling his thwarted bus trip Saturday night to the site of the opening night party for Mipcom Junior, the children’s programming showcase that preceded Monday’s main event.
“It started raining but I’m a born-and-bred Vancouverite so I figured ‘no big deal’ before it went from little, to heavier, to is ‘is somebody kidding me?’”
After flying from Victoria, with stops in Calgary and Montreal enroute to Nice, before making his way to Cannes for the world’s biggest TV market, Leiren-Young was exhausted.
His exhaustion was upstaged by excitement over the prospect of experiencing the glitz and glamour associated with the French Riviera’s film capital during his first Mipcom visit, however.
The author (Never Shoot a Stampede Queen), playwright and screenwriter (The Green Chain) was in Cannes to cover the event for Reel West, and to talk up Moby Doll: The Whale That Changed the World, his upcoming documentary based on an article he wrote for The Walrus that also aired as a CBC radio broadcast.
Nothing could have prepared Leiren-Young for the sudden violent storms and flash flooding that poured 170 milllimetres of rain on Cannes within two hours on Saturday night, he said.
At least 17 people were killed on the French Riviera during storms that disrupted traffic, halted train service, dragged cars out to sea and knocked out electricity, telephone service and Wi-Fi access.
“It was so beautiful in the afternoon,” said Leiren-Young, who had posted a photo of his sun-kissed self taken in front of palm trees and the ocean. “Hours later I was knee-deep in muck.”
Road conditions were so bad Saturday night the bus driver told him he’d have to walk 20 minutes in the pouring rain to reach the Mipcom Junior gala, held in a massive tent.
He didn’t learn until later why he couldn’t hail a taxi. They had stopped running.
“By the time I arrived at the party, I looked like I’d swam there,” laughed Leiren-Young, who looks like a drowned rat in his later Facebook photo. “I was squeezing the water out of my sweater and jeans.”
He arrived just in time to see lightning bolts and to be told, along with other party guests, it was time to leave.
“The organizers were tactfully evacuating the tent, without screaming. Tents and lightning are not a great combination.”
Realizing Leiren-Young, 53, didn’t have a lift back to his hotel, a sympathetic Telefilm Canada media officer put him in a van with Mipcom staffers.
“We were staring at puddles, but by the time the van dropped people off, the puddles became swamps,” he recalled. After the van driver was unable to find the route to his hotel, the Hotel Villa Franca, three kilometres from city centre, Leiren-Young feared the worst.
“I’m trying to say ‘please don’t abandon me’ in my B.C. high school French I took with a conditional pass, the condition being that I never speak French again,” he recalled, laughing.
After unsuccessful attempts to connect with a Mipcom organizer by cellphone to translate while sirens blared, he finally connected long enough for her tell the driver to drop him near his hotel shuttle.
The driver dropped him off on the wrong side of the bus, however, so Leiren-Young had to walk through mounting sludge to board it.
“I’m thinking: ‘I’m sure they have great sewage treatment here, right? Just like in Victoria.’”
His “underwater” ordeal was bizarrely appropriate given his new film’s subject matter, admitted Leiren-Young, who spent months on Saturna Island writing and researching the film and accompanying book about the killer whale that was harpooned in the summer of 1964 off Saturna.
“It’s an underwater story about Moby Doll, the first killer whale in captivity,” he said. “I’m doing this in honour of Moby Doll.”
