Twelve days of red carpet moments...

The Festival de Cannes is at once a field of dreams and a battleground: the stakes are high, the possibilities endless. Whether you’re a producer, distributor, promoter, journalist, photographer, actor or simply a cinemagoer, there are a thousand others just like you at Cannes and you need to fight at every stage to stand out from the others and get what you want, whether it’s the scoop of the festival, a prize, distribution deal or mere ticket to a screening.

Inevitably therefore, ego and hierarchy both come out to play. And nowhere is the ego more sensitive than among our directors. This article will take a look at the feature film programming for Cannes 2010 (12th – 23rd May) – across all the competitions – moving from our big name directors in and out of competition, down to the rising talent to look out for, the names that inspire fear in our established directorial titans, terrified that they may be upstaged by a little-known ingénue…

The Cannes Festival 101

Before we begin, here’s a very quick rundown of the different Cannes programmes, since one can so easily get lost in the jargon – each has its own particular traits and qualities, as well as commanding a different type of respect. At the heart of the festival, the centre of attention is always the ‘Official Competition’, where around 20 films from across the globe compete for the holy Palme d’Or (Golden Palm). Here it’s very rare to find first-time directors, but rather familiar auteur faces, Cannes old-handers – rumours and records attest to the fact that it’s rare for a previous Palme d’Or winner to ever be rejected from the Official Competition.

Alongside this runs ‘Un Certain Regard’ – a respected and more leftfield collective of lesser-known talents. A handful of films make up the ‘Out of competition’ collection – this is where Cannes can put its Hollywood blockbusters without being judged, and two of these will open and close the festival. Around ten other films make up the midnight and special screenings.

At the same time, two other collections outside the festival run at the same time – Critics’ Week and the Directors’ Fortnight. Their main objectives are the discovery of new talent, but just occasionally, you’ll get some surprises, sometimes resulting from egos that have been bruised elsewhere, as I’ll explain later. It’s worth noting that all of these selections have accompanying short films selections, except for A Certain Regard, while there is another short film section called the Cinefondation which has a training programme for featured directors during the festival. We look at the shorts directors in this month’s special edition Magathèque.

What’s happening at Cannes 2010?

The out of competition selection is no less glitzy than usual, with at least two films providing food for meditation on property and money – they are Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (opening the festival) and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2. Woody Allen is in there too with You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger – his first film with rumoured-new-muse Freida Pinto, acting alongside a titanic ensemble featuring Naomi Watts, John Brolin, Anthony Hopkins and more. Interestingly, Allen has shown rather atypical Cannes-director behaviour – although the festival has always been loyal to Allen, Festival Director Thierry Frémaux says the director refused their request to feature his film in competition. In any case, all these films give the festival its requisite injection of glamour, will rain a shower of international superstars onto their red carpet, and guarantee front page splashes worldwide.

Onto the competition, you do have to know your world cinema to navigate your way through! Starting at the top, we’ve got Bourne Identity director Doug Liman (the sole American) with his Naomi Watts-Sean Penn spy thriller Fair Game, alongside Mike Leigh single-handedly flying the British flag with two of his regulars – Imelda Staunton and Jim Broadbent – in Another Year. Moving onto Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu – the man behind Amores Perros and 21 Grams, he brings us Biutiful, featuring Javier Bardem. Inarritu hasn’t yet delivered a gem since parting ways with his long-time screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, but Biutiful will deliver another multistranded narrative in the style that he’s made his own, with Javier Bardem.

Bardem on the set of Biutiful with Inarritu

The French contingent is made up by seasoned veteran Bertrand Taverier with period drama La Princesse de Montpensier, while Mathieu Almaric, a relative directorial amateur (better known as an actor – he is our latest bond villain) has snuck in with Tournée. This is quite interesting since there are a couple of key French absences, notably Potiche from Francois Ozon, and Miral from Julian Schnabel.

Abbas Kiarostami delivers his first film made outside Iran (shot in Tuscany) Copie Conforme starring Juliette Binoche (who graces this year’s poster), while Takeshi Kitano is back with Outrage. South Korea stake out their territory with The Housemaid from Im Sangsoo – a remake of a 1960s thriller about a man who has an affair with the family housemaid, and Poetry from Lee Chang-dong, a dark character study about a woman trying to come to terms with her husband’s death.

The current list presents 16 films, while we can normally expect 20. This suggests they may pull four out of the wings at the last minute. Fingers are crossed across the cinematic blogosphere that one of these will be Terence Malick’s Tree of Life featuring Brad Pitt.

Regarding Un Certain Regard…

The titan of Un Certain Regard this year is Jean-Luc Godard, who is mysteriously credited as the sole director of Socialisme, although it is a portmanteau film featuring short films by seven directors. Six different trailers have intriguingly been released for the feature – scroll down to check out just one of them.

101-year old Portgueuse director Manoel de Oliveira is still going strong, bringing us The Strange Case of Angelica, while Romanian director Cristi Puiu, previous winner of Un Certain Regard with The Death of Mr Lazarescu is back with Aurora. Canadian wunderkid Xavier Dolan is at his second Cannes – last year he blew everyone’s socks off with I Killed my Mother – which he directed and acted in, at 19 years of age.

Ring director Hideo Nakata’s Chatroom – a horror depicting youths who meet online and go wild – sounds oddly un-Cannes-like, but intriguing. Rivalling him in the horror stakes is first-time French director’s Fabrice Gobert’s Simon Werner has disappeared – a Paris-set high school murder mystery – while there’s more youth culture in David Verbeek’s R U There, described as a film about the children of Google, YouTube and Second Life. It’s all very 21^st century. On the likely-to-hit-a-good-number-of-cinemas front, we’ve also got Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, featuring Michelle Willaims and Ryan Gosling as a couple breaking up.

Anything else we shouldn’t miss?

This leaves us with Critics Week and the Directors’ Fortnight. Of the mere seven competition features in Critics’ Week I’m looking forward to Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson’s Sound of Noise – this Swedish duo made one of the most original short films I’ve ever seen, also heavily centred on sound – Music for one Apartment and Six Drummers. Meanwhile, out of competition is Quentin Dupieux – aka Flat Eric – who premieres Rubber, described intriguingly as a tale about the adventures of a telepathic, murdering tyre in the Californian desert. Yep, I typed and you read that right.

It really is a horror film about a tyre..

The Director’s Fortnight has a new head this year – Frédéric Boyer, who has made it clear where his priorities lie: “Films by well-known directors don’t interest us as much. The Forinight’s purpose is to discover new talent. I’m more interested in filmmakers that have never been seen before.” Indeed, half this year’s line up will be from new directors. This is all interesting since this strand opened last year with Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro after the director snubbed the offer of a non-competing slot…

What captured my interest is that we finally see some interesting female directing talent here, from two professionals who I’ve watched on the short film circuit. Alicia Duffy directed Bafta-nominated The Most Beautiful Man in the World, while Katel Quillevéré has an excellent short film portfolio, often exploring blossoming sexuality – in fact (warning, plug) she is a keystone in my programme of erotic short films by female filmmakers at the upcoming Sexy Paris Film Festival. It’s consistent that her feature A Violent Poison features a young Catholic girl troubled by a burgeoning emotional and physical desire for a free-spirited boy, just as she’s preparing for her confirmation. Meanwhile Duffy’s début All Good Children is a psychological drama about two Irish children dealing with their mother’s suicide in France.

Personally, I’m excited about Danish director Christoeffer Boe’s Everything will be fine, offering us a thriller with a film director who flees the scene of a car accident  but later discovers that the man he ran into has a dangerous secret – hopefully not autobiographical… The US entry from Cam Archer – Shit Year – presents a has-been Hollywood actor falling in love with a younger man. Meanwhile, Boyer predicts lots of attention for the politically charged The Light Thief from Kyrgyzstan’s Aktan Arym Kubat.

And ultimately, it’s that last sentence that reminds us of the beauty of the Cannes experience – it’s one of a tiny handful of festivals that give you the whole panorama of cinema, from that guilty dash of Hollywood through to Iranian, Malaysian, Russian, Italian, Thai or Mexican – it’s all there and more, reminding us that any country can deliver a wonderful cinematic experience. Whether there’s a name in the credits that you recognise or not, the most important thing is to be open-minded. Whatever the predictions are beforehand, they’re rarely right – the festival will unfold in its won way, throwing surprises at you from every angle, and best of all, the rest of the world will spend the next year trying to catch up.