It could have been up there with the most spectacular Cannes parties ever — but alas, there will not be any festival visitors engaging in drunken revelry at the famed Villa Nellcote in Villefranche-sur-Mer.
That’s the famed mansion where The Rolling Stones holed up as tax exiles in 1972, where they started work that would become Exile On Main Street. The villa gets plenty of screen time in Stephen Kijak’s Stones In Exile, which premieres in Directors Fortnight on May 19. (The film includes lots of never-before-seen archive footage and photos.) But Kijak tells Screen that even he couldn’t get inside the gates of Nellcote when he was shooting footage for Stones in Exile. “Some billionaire Russians own it,” Kijak says. “We got near it, but not inside the gate. We tried for months and months. It’s sad, the current owners don’t seem to want anything to do with the legacy of the house.”
Too bad, that would have been one hell of an after-screening party location with Mick and Keith reliving the old days! If you want a guarantee of seeing a Rolling Stone in person, Jagger will accompany Kijak for a Q&A after the screening on the 19th.
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