Artificial intelligence, QR codes, call buttons: the security of 77e Cannes Festival will be imbued with technology with experimental devices at a time when the vigipirate plan is at its maximum level, in the run-up to the Paris Olympics.
With its host of stars, the crowds trying to catch a glimpse of them and 4,500 accredited journalists, the festival will this year be scrutinized by 17 “video protection cameras using artificial intelligence (AI)”, announced the Cannes town hall.
This device is installed “on an experimental basis” around the Palais des Festivals, the most monitored area where the screenings take place and where, among others, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Emma Stone, Selena Gomez, Catherine Deneuve and Demi are expected. Moore.
This technology will allow the Municipal Urban Protection Center (CPU) to “identify events or behaviors deemed suspicious or at risk” and to help detect abandoned packages, the presence of weapons, people on the ground or even any crowd movement, details the town hall.
Requested “from 2019”, these “additional technological means of surveillance” can be used during this edition thanks to “the law relating to the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games”, specified the mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard.
These cameras will be associated with “the densest video protection network in France”, with 884 cameras or “one for 84 inhabitants”, to “make the security system more effective”, adds the mayor.
Other technical support: “462 emergency call buttons, connected directly to the CPU, were deployed in a pioneering manner by the municipality in public spaces as well as in schools, nurseries, public buildings and facilities, places of worship and businesses”.
However, two months before the Paris Olympics and their security challenge, if Cannes can count on 200 municipal police officers and 66 municipal surveillance agents, Cannes elected officials were worried at the end of April about a possible lack of national police personnel. .
QR Codes
The Ministry of the Interior wanted to be reassuring by specifying to AFP that there will be four units of mobile forces of around 100 civil servants each, like in other years.
If the entire security system has not yet been definitively decided, a representative of the Alpes-Maritimes prefecture also assured AFP that “the level of security will not be degraded compared to previous years”.
The security system will be presented the day before the opening of the festival, indicates the prefecture.
The organizers, for their part, mobilized 400 security agents for screening and surveillance inside the Palace.
But the festival also includes numerous private parties organized on beaches, in villas or on yachts, which call on private security companies.
Thus, on the Magnum beach in front of the JW Marriott hotel, which hosted the evenings of three Palme d’Or-winning films, “we are going to set up QR codes, that is to say that all people will have to be accredited beforehand for security reasons,” Frédéric Henry, press manager for the brand, told AFP.
During the evenings which will punctuate the nights of this 77e edition, the Magnum beach will be able to count on its ambassadors, the South African singer-songwriter Troye Sivan and Pierre Garnier, former winner of the Star Academy, to make the stars dance as well as Iggy Pop, Mika, Justice and Nicky Doll. “Between 15 and 20 agents” will be present to secure the premises, as well as a dog handler and a lifeguard.
At the Carlton Hotel, which notably welcomes the president of the jury, the American Greta Gerwig, “security is reinforced during the festival”, we are told without further details. Security requires…
