A power outage that snarled the final day of the Cannes Film Festival was the work of French anarchists, the groups claimed in a letter posted online
A power outage that snarled the final day of the Cannes Film Festival was the work of French anarchists, the groups claimed in a letter posted online. The announcement follows a second power outage on Sunday, an arson attack on high-voltage equipment that left the city of Nice without power for much of the day.
According to electricity network operator RTE, Saturday’s disruption began with an overnight fire at an electrical substation near Cannes, followed by a downed high-voltage line at another location. The outage knocked out power to around 160,000 households across the Alpes-Maritimes area, and left hotels and businesses in the obscure.
Some film fest screenings were canceled or postponed, as organizers “switched to an independent power supply,” Cannes Film Festival officials said in a statement. After a five-hour outage, power was restored by 3 p.m. local time, allowing the closing ceremonies to continue as planned. However, the damage was already done for area restaurants, shops, and miniature businesses, all of which had expected the final day of the fest to bring high sales and profits.
Almost immediately, local administrators said they believed sabotage was to blame. Area prefect Laurent Hottiaux issued a statement condemning “serious acts of damage” and saying “All resources are mobilized to identify, track down, arrest and bring to justice the perpetrators of these acts.” A subsequent investigation revealed two separate acts of arson in the Saint-Cassien power plant, FranceInfo reports, as well as several power line pylons across the Alpes-Maritimes that appeared to be intentionally sawn off.
Early Sunday, a second blackout in Nice was attributed to an arson attack at an electrical transformer in the area, the Guardian reports. Power was restored a few hours later, with Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi saying on social media that “the national and municipal police will be mobilized” to identify suspects in the sabotage. “We are making the images of our monitoring center available to investigators,” Estrosi wrote. “I strongly condemn these evil acts in our country.”
In a message posted to a French outpost of the global organizing network Indymedia, a note attributed to “two bands of anarchists” claimed credit for the acts.
“On the eve of the Cannes Film Festival awards ceremony and gala evening, we sabotaged the main electrical substation supplying the Cannes metropolitan area and cut down the 225 kV line coming from Nice,” the letter, which was written in French, continues.
“This action was aimed not only at disrupting the festival, but also at cutting off power to the research centers and factories of Thales Alenia Space, its dozens of subcontractors, the French Tech start-ups that thought they were safe, the airport, and all other industrial, military, and technological establishments in the area.”
The message ends with a log line and summary of a hypothetical film called Sabotage 2: Night in Cannes. “Set in a world on the brink of apocalypse, the film chronicles the adventures of a libertarian commando unit tasked with sabotaging technological factories of great military importance,” the pitch begins. “When they decide to strike at the time of a prestigious cultural event, a race against time begins..
The authors of the message did not provide the names of their groups, nor did they offer any contact information for interested filmmakers who took their film pitch at face value.
A connection between the message and the attacks has yet to be publicly verified by officials, nor have the outages in Nice and Cannes been officially linked. Via statement, Nice prosecutor Damien Martinelli says that an investigation is still in the early stages, and work remains “to clarify the damage and the manner in which the act was committed.”
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