The thing about hope: A Cannes diary from Joe Wilkie and Cathal Mongey, Australian Young Lions
Joe Wilkie from Moonsail (left) and Cathal Mongey from Juicebox (right) are the WA duo who represented Australia in the Film category of this year’s Cannes Young Lions competition. After creating a film in just 36 hours for the Princess of Monaco Foundation, they earned a coveted place on the global shortlist. Here, they share the highs, lows and hard-won lessons from the experience, exclusive to Campaign Brief.
4am, Saturday morning. We are sitting on the only patch of beach in Cannes not covered in brand activations or “reserved for VIPs”, though the smell of piss is still ever-present along the Croisette. Behind us, the Gutter Bar heaves with the world’s best and brightest advertising minds, all of them milking the last moments of the festival for all the company credit card will allow. They carry Lion awards of various colours, holding onto them with a white-knuckle grip while juggling warm Heinekens and the handshakes of people wearing wristbands that run all the way up their arms. There’s a deep sense of relief here. Maybe that their work has been recognised, that their name was in lights. Others are just glad it’s over. For us, this week has been a glimpse into a world that is faster, louder and brighter than anything we’ve ever seen. It was everything we ever hoped for.
Hope is what got us here after all. Sitting in Cathal’s kitchen and hearing Ant Melder announce over zoom that we were the 2026 Australian Young Lions, we cried tears of hope. Hope was motivating us. It’s probably easy to call the unconventional creative team from WA “underdogs”, but “hopeful” feels closer to the truth.
Of course, when we sat in the basement of the Palais in Cannes on Monday and received the brief alongside 41 other teams, that hope was challenged. What hope did we have against the rest of the world? Team India sat in front of us having already beaten tens of thousands competitors in their own country to be here. Team Norway were six-feet tall with matching t-shirts. Team Argentina were late to the briefing because they were upstairs receiving actual Gold Lions. But that’s the thing about hope. It’s hard to kill.
The brief was for the Princess of Monaco Foundation and essentially boiled down to this: Get parents to pay attention to their kids in the water because drownings are not loud or easy to spot.
We ate noodles in the hotel bar until the early hours, surrounded by notes and half formed ideas. Collating our thoughts, we found something – what if we tricked people into missing a drowning? A sweaty, restless 3-4 hours of sleep later we had our idea and we started to feel it again. Hope.
The next 36 hours was a mess.
Locations, props, logistics, “How are we going to cast a French child?”, casting a French child, getting on the wrong train, getting on the right train, the talent pulling out, the talent opting back in, impending storms, pebble beaches (HATE), gear drama, shooting, unintentional swimming, sunburn (ironic), editing, falling asleep editing, another sweaty sleep, VO records, terrible coffee, music composition, colour grading, program crashes, re-recording the VO in an elevator, feedback, tweaks, tweaks, overthinking, tweaks, and holy-shit-we-just-submitted. Then, that feeling again.
We were still nervous, of course. We knew we had something, but it was still tempered by everything else. Had we missed something, were our gut-feelings wrong, should we have just played this one safe, like we were told to? We were also halfway through the week and hadn’t actually been to a minute of the festival itself. Time for a gear change and a different kind of hope.
Walking along the Croisette, we were pushed aside by Lando Norris’ security as they ushered him to a limo. We were admonished by the staff at the TikTok garden for managing to get access (it was shit anyway). We tried and failed eight different times to get onto Spotify Beach. We complained to the Global CCO of McCann that the drinks at the Gutter Bar were too expensive. We bailed up ECDs on dancefloors to show us our film. We (Joe) nursed hangovers that never seemed to go away. We ate lunch at restaurants that didn’t have menus, paid for by people we barely knew. We swam off the back of private yachts we’d talked our way onto. We raved with the Tellie-Tubbies and booed the co-founder of a rather large multinational software company. We shook so many hands, told and re-told so many stories, drank and ate whatever free things we could get our hands on and stubbornly stayed out to the early hours because “we’ll sleep when we’re dead” is just code for not wanting to miss out on a second of the thing you’ve worked so hard towards.
Then we found ourselves sitting in the Debussy theatre, shaking with anxiety as they announced the shortlist for the film category.
We were on it. That’s what we hoped for. But the medal announcements were still to come.
Bronze: Hungary.
Silver: Norway.
Gold: Georgia.
There was a numb feeling that settled on us as the ceremony ended. Everyone was about to tell us that just making the shortlist was an incredible achievement and we should celebrate it. They’re right of course. But we were disappointed, bitterly so. That feels strange to write but it’s the truth. Hope can be dangerous, too.
Sitting on that beach at 4am on Saturday morning, it still stung. But, we’ve agreed that it’s a good thing. That it’s motivating to want something, to hope for something and just not quite get it. That we are allowed to feel this way, to try and fail, because it’s what makes this work in the first place. That the thing that was filling us with disappointment was what made the whole thing possible.
Because that’s the thing about hope. It doesn’t go away.
Register for FREE HERE and receive the Campaign Brief Daily Bulletin and/or the global Best Ads Best of the Week Bulletin. Subscribe to Campaign Brief Magazine.
#More Creative News #No paywalls #No annual membership fees
Subscribe to Portfolio & Reel for current listings of Australian and NZ ad agency and production company leadership and key personnel.