In Cannes, from the top of the stairs of the Palais du Festival, Gilles Jacob has seen the film world come to him for more than 30 years. To the impassioned spectator of the whole world's cinema. Gilles Jacob owes his position as the president of the world's greatest film festival above all to his love of the cinema, which he has always cultivated just as one cultivates one's garden. The hazards of life have also added another string to his bow: the management skills which have enabled him to determine the trajectory - in the extremely fragile balance between cinema as an art and as an industry - of a Festival which brings together the greatest directors of the 7th Art, alongside the largest film market in the world. His story will be reconstituted through a stroll taken by Gilles Jacob along the Croisette in Cannes before the 2009 festival