Is social media a waste of time, as David Remnick said? Maybe so. But Twitter, Instagram and the rest make keeping up with other people’s lives easy and free. Where the Cannes festivalgoer is concerned, a spur-of-the-moment video on Instagram by a filmmaker can potentially add insight into what they’re experiencing. At the same time, it’s important not to lose touch of the fact that social media is often as vapid as it is useless (social media is ambiguous like that) and Instagram is just for laughs. The following directors have films in the 2017 slate and an Instagram account (those accounts with no posts haven’t been listed):

OUT OF COMPETITION

Agnès Varda (“Visages, Villages”; featured image)
@agnesvardaofficiel
(3,502 followers, 32 following)

MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS

Jean Stéphane Sauvaire (“Prayer before Dawn”)
@jeanstephanesauvaire
(45 posts and 431 followers)

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Jon Shenk, “An inconvenient sequel”
@jonshenk
(private account)
(25 posts 157 followers)

Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, “They”
@anahitagz
(5563 followers, 1245 posts)

VIRTUAL REALITY

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, “Carne y arena”
@thealejandroinarritu
(358 followers, 1 post)

70TH ANNIVERSARY

David Lynch “Twin Peaks” (this is his foundation’s official account)
@davidlynchfoundation
(100k followers, 572 posts)

COMPETITION

Fatih Akin, “Aus Dem Nichts”
@fatih_bombero
(5341 followers, 150 posts)

Sofia Coppola, “The Beguiled”
@sofiacoppola
(4076 followers, 408 posts)

Michel Hazanavicius, “Le Redoutable”
@michelhazanavicius
(1045 followers, 8 posts)

Naomi Kawase, “Hikari”
@naomikawase
(1929 followers, 180 posts)

Yorgos Lanthimos, “The killing of a sacred deer”
@yorgoslanthimos
(601 followers, 24 posts)
I could not verify whether this was Lanthimos’s account or not. His gallery, which features twenty-four heads photographed from behind, has enough bold strangeness to qualify as being of him, in my eyes.

Benny Safdie “Good Time”
@bowedtie
(1625 followers, 1153 posts)

Josh Safdie, “Good time”
@booger_nose
(6860 followers, 872 posts)

UN CERTAIN REGARD

Stephane Komandarev, “Posoki”
@komandarev
(752 followers, 1 post)

Festival heads Thierry Frémaux and Pierre Lescure, the festival’s general delegate and its recently-named president, respectively, are also on Instagram although their presence is more symbolic: both seem to have taken to Twitter more.

Thierry Frémaux (General Delegate)
@thierry.fremaux

Pierre Lescure (President)
@pierre.lescure

And, finally, the Cannes Festival has an official Instagram, on which it publishes posts in French, along with a translation in approximate English. This account’s popularity has been on the rise, with a major boost in followers predicted in the next eleven days, while the festival is ongoing.

Cannes Festival
@festivaldecannes

Ali Naderzad (@screencomment) will be in Cannes to cover the 70th edition of the Cannes Festival during May 17-27, 2017. 

Image: Agnès Varda holding a poster with the Instagram logo burned on it (graphic by ALI NADERZAD)