Spit Test For COVID-19: A Must For Cannes Film Festival Attendees

The annual Cannes Film Festival has been launched this week with a strict and difficult COVID-19 testing process for attendees.

According to Variety, one of the first things attendees will have to do is a spit test. Cannes has hired Biogroup laboratory to conduct the saliva test at the event as it makes a comeback after being canceled last year due to the pandemic.

But while the saliva test is hailed for its efficacy apart from being “less invasive” than the nose swab, it wasn’t so easy, the report said.

Olivia Wilson, an intern at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, told Variety about the difficulty she faced while going through the testing. She said she had to spit over and over again in a plastic tube to make sure she didn’t have COVID-19.

“It was difficult for me,” Wilson said, adding that she couldn’t produce enough saliva for the laboratory to work on.

Hours before the event opened Tuesday, festival attendees were led to a large room just steps away from where the movies would premiere. In the makeshift COVID-19 testing center, they were handed plastic containers with an attached funnel where they could aim their spit for the mandatory test.

“It has to be liquid. Foam doesn’t count,” a Biogroup employee was cited as saying by Variety. Several attendees were annoyed due to the testing process as they waited in line to produce more spit to satisfy laboratory requirements.

The report said that many vials were put in trash because they “failed to meet the standards” of the test. In one instance, a vial of spit was discarded as someone had coughed up a piece of food, thus contaminating the sample, the report said.

Those who failed to produce enough saliva were instead given a traditional nose swab test, Just Jared reported.

According to French laws, participants of indoor gatherings must be vaccinated or show proof of a PCR test. But due to the limitations of an app that the French government uses that allows citizens to show they’ve been vaccinated, those arriving at the festival from countries outside of the European Union’s COVID-19 tracking system won’t have a transferable bar code to show they’ve been vaccinated.

Non-European attendees would be required to undergo COVID-19 testing every 48 hours to enter the Palais, the site where “scrappy producers set up tables to market their films and movie stars whisk in through a back door to hold press conferences,” Variety reported.

However, those who are attending movie screenings are exempted from testing protocols as France does not require proof of vaccination inside film theaters.

In this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which is known to draw thousands of filmmakers and journalists around the world, Spike Lee sits as the jury president.