Reporters gather outside the Novotel hotel during the 66th international film festival, in Cannes, southern France.PARIS - Thieves ripped a safe from the wall of a hotel room near the Cannes Film Festival Thursday night and made off with around $1 million worth of jewelry, in a brazen late-night burglary just hours after the screening of a film about break-ins at the homes of Hollywood celebrities, French officials said today.
The apparently well-planned robbery at the Novotel hotel took place in the room of an employee of Chopard, the Swiss-based watch and jewelry maker and festival sponsor that was hosting a splashy gala event in a far ritzier hotel around the same time, officials said.
Chopard has loaned jewelry to A-list stars who walk on the festival's famed red carpet under rapid-fire flashes of photographers' cameras. Already this year model Carla Delevingne and actress Julianne Moore have walked the carpet in Chopard gems.
"The jewels stolen are not part of the collection of jewels that are worn by actresses during the Cannes film festival," Chopard spokeswoman Raffaella Rossiello told reporters in a brief statement Friday.
Cmdr. Bernard Mascarelli, a judicial police spokesman in the nearby city of Nice, said he didn't know the exact type of jewelry taken, or its exact value.
"Numbers have been put forward that we're still trying to verify, but the figure of $1 million ... we're in that range," he said.
The night of the robbery, Chopard hosted a star-studded gala, and the festival screened Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring," a deadpan drama about celebrity-obsessed teenagers in Los Angeles who break into the homes of Paris Hilton and other stars. It's based on a true story about high-school students who, after seeing online when certain stars are expected at a premiere or other event, take the opportunity to steal items from their homes.
Melissa Levine, a spokeswoman for Accor, the French hospitality giant behind Novotel, declined comment about the case.