The Cannes-do spirit

The Cannes plans move a little further forward.

By now we have missed the official accreditation deadline, and are solidly into ball-ache territory. As their website likes to remind people: 'any accreditation requests received after April 1st, 2011 will be subject to severe restrictions. They will only be delivered on an highly exceptional basis upon presentation of supporting professional documents, and will be billed administrative handling costs.'

Damn – I so wish that we’d hooked up with Jim Eaves a month ago.

Because the festival really wants people to pre-register they make this late-registration system extraordinarily convoluted and patience-sapping. And then charge us 75€ each for the privilege. So, Jake and I have been dutifully getting our shit together: updating our CVs, sending out press releases and writing articles to boost our SEO scoring. If someone types our names into Google we need to make sure that something relevant appears. 

Presentation of supporting professional documents? Really? Sure enough, buried on one of the many web-sites dedicated to berating the tardy filmmaker is the key bit of info. All they do is check the Internet Movie Database.

I truly love IMDb. This is so much more than just a source of information about everything that's important to me. It’s a perfect microcosm that describes the genius of the internet. It’s the best justification for owning a smartphone, or for having some kind of easy-surf device sat next to your favourite spot on the sofa. This is the place where all my most useful useless trivia lives, a virtual substitute for all those vanishing engrams. I'm 41. My memory has had its Elvis year, and now it needs assistance getting about the place. I spent twenty minutes trying to think what Juliette Lewis' surname was on Sunday.

And I'm not on it. And neither is Jake.

I'd always thought that this was a members-only club, and you had to be invited to join. Go out and make a movie, and the IMDb doorman will take the finished DVD as your ticket to go inside. You hear about these elusive and exclusive festivals that offer an IMDb entry as a prize should your short film be accepted to play there, and so we really weren't expecting to be able to do much about ramping up our respective IMDb footprints.

And it’s fair to say that they didn't make it easy for us.

But if you can find the right link, and are happy to wade and wade again through the most unintuitive and irritating user-interface known to man, you can at least submit your details for consideration. And, my God, was it irritating. If you needed to engineer a sense of pure frustration in a subject before some psychology experiment you'd have them work their way through something very similar.

But, in 2-4 weeks, and pending the approval of the IMDb management, Resurrection could be up on the Internet Movie Database as an in-development project, to be written and directed by Jake Hawkins and Andy Phelps (III).

I mean, how exclusive can a club be when there’s already two of me inside? Cheapened.