On the French Riviera, the custodians of cinema gathered not to celebrate the art form but to defend it. France, long the self-appointed guardian of film culture against commercial erosion, convened an international summit of producers, directors, and policymakers confronting a dual disruption: the attention economy of short-form video platforms and the rising capacity of artificial intelligence to generate visual content without human hands. The meeting was less a conference than a reckoning — an acknowledgment that the economic and cultural foundations of traditional cinema are shifting bene