Drinking, Movies, and Sobriety at the Cannes Film Festival

In a personal essay for The Paris Review, writer Inney Prakash recounts his fraught relationship with alcohol set against the backdrop of the Cannes Film Festival. He first got sober at Cannes in 2019 after a six-and-a-half-year streak of nightly drinking, attending AA meetings in a church on the Croisette. He relapsed after returning to Detroit, leading to a suicide attempt and a nine-day stay in a psychiatric ward. After moving to New York, he worked as a film programmer and started an experimental film festival during the pandemic. At Cannes 2021, he relapsed again after a party, but subsequently recommitted to AA and completed the twelve steps. By Cannes 2022, he felt solid in sobriety. The essay interweaves analysis of films about alcoholism, including Ulrike Ottinger's Ticket of No Return, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Abel Ferrara's The Addiction, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden (2026). Prakash reflects on the suicidal thoughts that persist despite sobriety and the role of cinema in his recovery.