In Citizen Cannes, Gilles Jacob traces his decades at the centre of the Cannes Film Festival, first as programmer and later as president.

Both a memoir and catalogue of cultural history, the book charts how a relatively contained European festival became the gravitational centre of global cinema—where careers are made, aesthetics are tested, and politics quietly shape the screen.

Jacob writes from inside the machinery: selection committees, late-night negotiations, egos, scandals, and the constant balancing act between art and spectacle. Directors, actors, and critics pass through, but the real subject is the system itself—the strange ecology of prestige, taste-making, and global attention that Cannes sustains. Less gossip (though it's there...) than a look at how cultural legitimacy is constructed, maintained, and occasionally disrupted.