Cannes returns to arthouse roots
By Mark Savage
Entertainment reporter, BBC News, in Cannes
After a couple of years where Hollywood threatened to overshadow the more serious side of the Cannes Film Festival, this year's event seems to have taken a step back towards the arthouse.
The jury, led by indie darling Sean Penn, will be watching a series of films by festival favourites such as Arnaud Desplechin and Wim Wenders.
And Belgian film-making duo the Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne will be hoping to make history by taking home their third ever Palme D'Or for mob drama The Silence Of Lorna.
But it is not just European directors who are making their mark - the festival's main competition sees entrants from Argentina, Singapore and the Philippines.
'Glamorous world'
There are of course some high profile Hollywood names to keep the balance - Clint Eastwood is bringing child abduction mystery The Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie.
And Ocean's 13 director Steven Soderbergh is debuting his ambitious, four-hour epic on Che Guevara.
"It is very important to have both the glamorous world and the auteur world," says Thierry Fremaux, the festival's artistic director.
Fremaux says that around 1,500 films were considered for Cannes, although he bemoans the fact that so many of them seemed to be cut from the same cloth.
"Because of the production process and because of TV, more and more films are similar," he says.
"A film festival is here to show that the cinema resists that.
"And having a young Singaporean director is a way to show that, like in literature or painting, it is still possible to show new bodies, new faces, new streets, new ways to talk, to eat, to love - what we call cultural diversity."
They've kept such a tight lid on the movie that I think people are aching to see it
Mark Dinning, editor of Empire magazine, on Indiana Jones
Still, one movie at the festival is bound to cut across those cultural divides and unite film fans around the world - the long-awaited Indiana Jones sequel.
Although it doesn't receive its world premiere until Sunday night, photographers and fans have already started to line up outside the Palais De Festivals in the hope of catching a glimpse of Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg and Cate Blanchett.
The queues to enter the single press screening are bound to be even bigger.
"It's going to be insane," says Mark Dinning, editor of Empire magazine.
"They've kept such a tight lid on the movie that I think people are aching to see it.
"It'll be a case of bring your boxing gloves if you want to get in, I think."
'Absolutely fantastic'
But with five days of festival to go before Indy grabs his fedora and bullwhips across the silver screen, there are plenty of early films creating a buzz.
The opening night movie, Blindness, sees City Of God director Fernando Mereilles turn up the horror factor in a story of humanity divided into two camps - those who can see and an increasingly disturbing "society of the blind".
"It's being pitched as a Children Of Men meets Day of the Dead, which has got me interested," says Dinning.
The home crowd, however, is more excited by Desplechin's family drama A Christmas Tale, which features a who's who of French cinema, including Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussillon and future Bond villain Mathieu Almaric.
Sean Penn heads this year's jury at the festival
Although the Cannes jury is notoriously hard to predict, money is already being placed on a Palme D'Or for China's Jia Zhangke.
His film 24 City mixes documentary, drama and Chinese superstar Joan Chen in a story about how the lives of ordinary people are affected when a state-owned factory is torn down to make way for luxury flats.
Penn is known for his outspoken political views - and may well push his colleagues to give the festival's top prize to a similarly outspoken film-maker from a country with a notoriously poor human rights record.
But there is stiff competition from Soderbergh's Che, a two-part biopic starring Benicio Del Toro - which is being presented as one feature in Cannes.
'Spending frenzy'
"The rumour is that it's his Godfather I and II," says Dinning. "The second one especially is supposed to be absolutely fantastic."
Michael Gubbins, from trade paper Screen International, is less enthusiastic, however.
"There are question marks about whether it will work," he says. "It sounds unwieldy."
Gubbins says there are early signs that this year's theme is movies from Latin America - led by the likes of The Motorcycle Diaries' director Walter Salles, who is back in competition with Brazilian drama Linha De Passe.
But more importantly, he says, the deals made behind the scenes at this year's festival "will decide what we see in the cinema for the next couple of years".
"Some of the other festivals this year have been a bit disappointing," notes Dinning, "so it seems to me that a lot of people are going to Cannes with fairly deep pockets. "There could be something of a spending frenzy, so it's exciting times."
.. we could go in the same direction as last year, keep this thread to discuss what the event is all exactly about- films!. 
I want to see 
Cate Blanchett (sp?) will be great in that. 
B)
