Don’t let anyone tell you that the world’s most famous film festival is about art or culture. The beating heart that powers Cannes is business. You can see it writ large on the seafront boulevard, the Croisette. The venerable hotels are draped with banners and advertising hoardings, looking as incongruous as the elderly Cannes ladies who prowl the town in gaudy, too-young designer duds.

Under the Palais des Festivals is a sprawling concrete bunker that houses the Cannes market. With the ambience of a multistorey car park and a smell of stale sweat and desperation, it’s an insalubrious maze of corridors. Inside, companies mark off their territory with flimsy stands and mocked-up posters of films yet to be made. Producers and sales agents wait endlessly, hopeful that some of the passing trade might be in the market for movies with names such as Bollywood Zombie or The Fists of Righteous Harmony. At the other end of the spectrum, the power brokers host meetings on luxuriously appointed yachts and nip in and out of town by helicopter.

It’s an intimidating world for an aspiring producer to make his mark; a place where a conversation in the queue for the toilets can make or break a career and where picking up the bar tab could lead to bankruptcy. But every year hundreds of ambitious, hungry (literally – even a sandwich in this town is a big production, with a budget to match) young film-makers stream into town looking for the connections to take their career to the next level.

Anna Higgs is a blonde with a ready smile and a Zelig-like ability to pop up everywhere and know everyone. With her producing partner Gavin Humphries she runs Quark Films. They have produced several award-winning short films and are preparing to move into features. Although it’s Quark’s third year at Cannes, this is the first time it’s using the festival to finance its films. “The first two times it was about understanding how the festival works and the lay of the land,” Higgs says. “This year we are employing that knowledge as best we can to finance two shoots and complete one feature documentary.”

Quark’s feature projects are a British-set horror film called Room 9; a feature-length documentary called Murderers on the Dance Floor, about the dancing Filipino prisoners whose rendition of the Thriller video became a YouTube phenomenon; and an American independent film called Unicorns.

So what is the most important thing that Higgs has learnt from her three years at Cannes? “On the frivolous side, the most important thing is having the gumption to blag into most parties because it is the place where people make connections. My first year at Cannes I was shadowing a legendary producer, who set me the challenge of getting into a party before him when he knew I didn’t have a ticket. And I did it.”

The astronomical prices in Cannes during the festival can be a problem for young film-makers on a shoestring. To economise, Jimmy Gasteen and David Pope from Year of the Dog Films are staying along the coast from Cannes. Unfortunately, a train strike left them stranded and desperately rescheduling meetings. When I meet them on the Grand Hotel’s terrace, they seem to be taking the inconvenience with good humour, but that could be something to do with the fact that they can already be considered a small-scale Cannes success story. Gasteen says: “We brought our first short, Gasoline Blood, to Cannes last year and met some people from EM Media, a regional funding body. So now we are back with a second film, Creeping Thirst.”

In Cannes and elsewhere in the film industry, there are plenty of people who call themselves producers without much evidence to back that up. Raphael Warner, who has a company called Joke Disco films, has produced several short films and has a development deal with BBC Films and one with Film Four, but says that until he has produced a feature-length film, he is loath to call himself a producer. “Stuart Till from UIP said if there’s a brain surgeon who had never done an operation, you would never believe he was a brain surgeon. I don’t think you can come here and call yourself a producer if all you have done are shorts.”

At 28, Warner is a six-year veteran of the festival; his most audacious party crash was getting into a bash for Luc Besson’s Europa Films by walking in backwards while talking on a mobile phone, “so it looked as if I had just nipped out to make a call and have a cigarette”.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010