News

Cannes Film Festival Postponed From May

The Cannes Film Festival announced on Thursday that the festival cannot be held on its previously scheduled May 12 to 23 date due to concerns about the COVID-19 coronavirus illness. The festival is exploring options with the possibility of postponement to a date sometime between late June and early July, and organizers will continue to monitor the health situation in France to determine possible actions.

In the United States, the U.S. State Department issued a level 4 travel advisory (the highest possible level) on Thursday against traveling abroad, urging Americans abroad to return to the United States "unless they are prepared to remain abroad for an indefinite period."

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a shelter-in-place order to California residents, ordering them to stay at home. While the state had issued a similar order to the Bay Area and Los Angeles County, this new order now applies to the entire state.

In Canada, the organizers of the Otafest anime convention in Calgary, Alberta canceled this year's convention. The convention was scheduled to take place on May 15-17. The province of Alberta announced its ban on mass gatherings on March 12. The organizers of Otafest stated the convention was "postponed" to May 21-23, 2021.

The organizers of Hawaii's Kawaii Kon announced on Thursday that the event will not be held as planned on May 15-17. Instead, the organizers will combine the convention with Kawaii Kon's sister event, Comic Con Honolulu, and will be held as a joint con on August 7-9.

The organizers of GDC announced that a GDC Summer 2020 event will take place on August 4-6 in San Francisco. The organizers announced last month that the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2020 event was postponed until this summer. The event was originally scheduled for March 16-20 in San Francisco.

The first reported cases of COVID-19 were in Wuhan, China in December, and then the disease began to spread in varying rates and intensities across many parts of the globe through incubation in human hosts. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a world health emergency on January 30, and announced on March 11 that it is classifying the outbreak as a pandemic. As of Thursday, the WHO reported that there are 209,839 infected individuals worldwide. 8,778 individuals have died from the disease.

Sources: Cannes Film Festival, IndieWire (Chris Lindahl), CNN (Jennifer Hansler, Nicole Gaouette, Kylie Atwood, Lauren Fox), California government website, SFGate (Amy Graff, Alyssa Pereira, Eric Ting), Otafest, Kawaii Kon's Facebook page, GDC via Siliconera