A young man in a black suit pokes his head around the corner of our little office at the Cannes film festival and asks whether I can help. Im an actor, he says. Im not well known at all. No-ones ever heard of me. Can you help me become famous?

He explains he is sleeping on the beach and bluffing his way into receptions by dressing like a security guard. Ill do anything, he says.

I never discover his name but he embodies a phenomenon that is almost as integral to the Cannes film festival as the red carpet and the stars, namely the desperate struggle of the unknowns.

If you don’t have a pass for screenings or press and promotional events it needs cunning and determination even to get in the door and enter a different realm from the tourists who crowd around the entrance to the main festival hall with signs asking for spare invitations.

More than one independent film maker sits on the Croisette busking his unfinanced projects while passers-by take pictures with their mobile phones. It seems hard to believe they have much luck.

On closer inspection, the suit worn by the young man who stopped in our office had the fatally shabby look of an ill-fated social climber in a Balzac novel and his naively direct approach was probably not the most profitable to take. Even young hopefuls with more obvious advantages struggle to get past the security guards in the big hotels and marquees.

 I put on big sunglasses and act like a star, explains one actress, trying to step up from the minor roles in horror films that she has had so far. Her striking looks and confident personality no doubt help and she at least is sleeping in a hotel room, albeit on someone else’s floor.

But it still doesn’t sound like much fun.

I am not entirely sure what it is that gives press conferences at the Cannes film festival their special, slightly awkward, feeling.

They are usually presided over by Henri Behar, a veteran French journalist with swept-back silver hair who looks out from the podium at his fellows with what seems like ill-disguised disdain, and they generally amount to a search for a sound bite in a tide of banality.

The stars and directors of the films are shamelessly flattered and they seem to do their best, but illuminating answers are at a premium.

Do you think that Jake is considered one of the most promising actors of his generation? someone asked David Fincher, director of the serial killer movie Zodiac of his star Jake Gyllenhaal.

Gyllenhaal, sitting alongside, responded with a creditable show of self- mockery and he had fulsome, if impenetrable, praise for his co-star Robert Downey Jr.

Working with Robert is like working in the eighth dimension, he said. He tells a Chinese journalist: “I love your shirt”.

Perhaps none of it is supposed to mean anything anyway since much of the time the press conferences seem to be about establishing a mood rather than conveying information.

Even so, the spectacle of journalists applauding, asking for autographs and taking pictures with their mobile phones is a strange one.

Listening to film makers trying to communicate their creative vision through the uncertain medium of a roomful of the worlds press can have a hidden comedy of its own though.

A dream is a form of reality but its your personal reality so the film is a dreamlike reality. It allows you to dream and I thought a lot in order not to give into the temptation to make images too beautiful, explained Andrei Zvyagintsev, director of The Banishment (through a translator, admittedly).

There is usually some kind of a gesture on everybodys part towards a shared love of the cinema. But occasionally what seems like a truer picture shows through.

British director Steven Frears, president of the Cannes jury, greeted a brash-sounding Australian journalist with a despairing Hello, Hello again, before turning to Australian actor and fellow jury member Toni Collette to ask Is she a friend of yours?