Deliberate acts of sabotage left much of southeastern France without power on the final day of the glamorous Cannes Film Festival, sparking an arson investigation ahead of closing celebrations, including the much-anticipated Palme d’Or ceremony.
Some 160,000 homes in the Alpes-Maritimes region, which includes Cannes, were affected by the sweeping blackout on Saturday, which dragged on for several hours and threatened to jeopardize the events before power was eventually restored, according to RTE, France’s electrical grid operator.
Some beachfront speakers boomed to life around 3 p.m. local time. The music, signaling the end of the outage, elicited cheers from frustrated locals.
Before that, The Palais des Festivals — the festival’s main venue — was left without power, forcing organizers to delay several screenings and make use of generators.
Traffic lights in parts of Cannes stopped working, leading to jams and confusion, and most of the shops along the Croisette had to close.
Laurent Hottiaux, the prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes department, blamed the widespread outage on “serious acts of damage to electrical infrastructures.”
The region went dark late Saturday morning, after a high-voltage line in the region toppled over, RTE said on X. It came hours after an overnight fire at an electrical substation just west of Cannes had already weakened the grid.
“We are looking into the likelihood of a fire being started deliberately,” said a police spokesperson for the French National Gendarmerie, adding that no arrests had yet been made.
Authorities have not yet said whether they believe the Cannes Film Festival, heralded as the most prestigious event of its kind, was the intended target of the hours-long outage.
After power was restored, the Saturday festivities continued as planned and stars began streaming down the red carpet. The festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, was awarded to “It Was Just an Accident,” a revenge thriller written and directed by Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi, whose films have often been banned in his country.
With News Wire Services
