CANNES: The Palais des Festivals, the central hub of the Cannes Film Festival, a massive bulwark of filmmaker-named halls and pristine movie screens, is about as close as you can get to a cinema temple. To enter, you must ascend red-carpeted steps.

But in the past 16 months, Cannes' Palais hasn't been home to the movie frenzy it hosts annually. Last year's festival was postponed, then canceled. The Palais, instead, was lined with hospital beds in the early months of the pandemic. Earlier this year, it was turned into a mass-vaccination 'Vaccinodrome.'