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Cannes film festival unveiled
The 12-day event will present a clutch of meaty Hollywood films including Bruce Willis starrrer ultra-violent Sin City.
The Cannes film festival, the world's top showcase of cinema, was to open in this French Riviera resort town on Wednesday with a slew of veteran auteurs vying for the prestigious Palme d'Or prize.
The 12-day event this year will present a clutch of meaty Hollywood films, among them the ultra-violent Sin City starring Bruce Willis and Star Wars III: The Revenge of the Sith.
A French film, Lemming, is to officially open the festival late Wednesday with the first of the daily red-carpet screenings during which celebrities and wannabes flaunt their stuff before the cameras.
In contrast with the uneven 2004 edition, in which Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 emerged victorious from a lacklustre field, this year will see tried-and-true Cannes directors at the helm of many of the 21 films in competition.
Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant, Michael Haneke, David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan will all be present, leaving a few wild cards in the pack -although they include the film directorial debut by the US actor Tommy Lee Jones, and a strong selection of Asian titles.
An early topical jolt to the often-controversial festival will be Kilometre Zero, an Iraqi feature about a young man conscripted during the Iraq-Iran war. The movie, directed by Hiner Saleem, will get its media showing late on Wednesday and its international premiere on Thursday.
As always, Hollywood has lent its glitz and excess to the occasion, transforming the Cannes seafront into a confusion of billboards promoting yet-to-be-released blockbusters.
Among them is the much-anticipated War of the Worlds, a remake of the HG Wells classic directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise.
While that movie is not in the festival, its distributor, DreamWorks, is hyping it heavily ahead of its worldwide release in just over a month's time, taking up prime locations for its posters and whetting the appetite of the 4,000 journalists at Cannes.
Star Wars III has been enlisted to fill the sci-fi gap in the meantime. It is scheduled to screen on Sunday, as a non-competition entry, marking the final work in a six-part interstellar saga that started way back in 1977.
While all the glare and cameras are trained on the big-budget releases and the Palme d'Or vanguard, parallel competitions will also be taking place, many of them brimming with new talent.
And in the bowels of the concrete complex that is at the centre of the festival, 35,000 movie types will be wheeling and dealing in what is known as the market: a sprawling maze of stands and tents in which production houses and national film agencies plug their wares.
Nightfall will see a plethora of parties revving up. The scene starts on beachside pavillions and yachts and migrates to exclusive villas and chateaux as the hours tick by.
For the 250,000 tourists and star-gazers drawn to Cannes, the event will offer a wealth of opportunities to see idols in the flesh, witness more than a few eye-catching publicity stunts - and for a short while be part of the heady craziness that is Cannes.
