To attend screenings at the Cannes Film Festival, you must either be an accredited attendee or hold an official invitation. Aside from screenings at the Cinéma de la Plage (beach cinema) which are open on a first come, first served basis, and a limited number of tickets for the Director's Fortnight, there is no access to festival screenings in the main venues for members of the general public.

Historically, tickets were only required for films screening 'in' or 'out' of competition. Due to COVID capacity restrictions, the festival implemented a ticketing system for the the 2021 event for ALL screenings. This remained in place for 2022 and is likely to stay for the foreseeable future. Tickets are now required for all screenings, regardless of festival section. This includes tickets for screenings in the sidebar events (Director's Fortnight, Critics' Week, and ACID). For accredited festivalgoers, tickets remain free on a first come, first served basis, and must be booked online and collected from the central ticket office at least four hours ahead of the screening time.

To be brutally frank, this system sucks. In the past, the ticketing website has been an amateurish joke, offering 1990s levels of design and functionality, with opaque logic behind the scenes that did not follow any obvious pattern. In recent years, the website offering has moved into the 2000s, but remains overall a frustrating and illogical user experience. We can only hope that one of these days the Festival's web team engages some professional experience designers to rectify what is probably the biggest stain on an otherwise impeccable record for running such a large event.

Anyway, at the beginning of the festival, you're asked to login and select the days you'll be in Cannes. You're then presented with the screening schedule for those days and you can pick the films you would like a ticket for. Sadly, this doesn't guarantee you a ticket, rather it puts you into an opaque system in which some people get allocated tickets and others don't.

Either way, around 24 hours before the scheduled screening time, you are notified via the same website (so you need to login to check) whether your request was successful or not. For those who are successful, tickets must then be collected from the Billetterie Centrale (Central Ticket Office), located in the Hall Méditeranée in the Palais des Festivals at least 4 hours before the screening.

Films showing in the Marché du Film (Market) are generally only open to holders of Market or Press accreditation.

A full rundown on the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, is available in the book, Cannes - A Festival Virgin's Guide (7th Edition).
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