The selection of movies competing for the Palme d'Or at the 58th Cannes Film Festival reads like an old boys' reunion for directors whose films screened at Cannes in earlier years - so many that the festival could be re-named Le Jour du Groundhog.
Former Palme winners back this year are Gus Van Sant with Last Days, featuring Michael Pitt as an early 1970s rock star; Wim Wenders with Don't Come Knockin', starring Sam Shepard (who co-scripted), Jessica Lange and Tim Roth; Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne with The Child; and Lars von Trier with the second film in his USA trilogy, Manderlay, starring Bryce Dallas Howard.
Cannes regulars returning include Jim Jarmusch with Broken Flowers, starring Jessica Lange, Bill Murray and Sharon Stone; Atom Egoyan with Where the Truth Lies, starring Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth and Alison Lohman; David Cronenberg with A History of Violence, starring Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello; Michael Haneke with Hidden, featuring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil; and Dominik Moll with Lemming, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Charlotte Rampling, which opens the festival on May 11th.
Newcomers to the competition include Best of Youth director Marco Tullio Giordana with his Italian immigration drama, Once You're Born You Can No Longer Hide; Robert Rodriguez with Sin City, based on Frank Miller's graphic novels and starring Bruce Willis, Clive Owen and Mickey Rourke; and Tommy Lee Jones with his feature directing debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
No Irish or UK productions were selected for competition this year, although the festival will close on May 22nd with an out-of-competition screening of Chromophobia, Martha Fiennes's UK entry starring Ben Chaplin, Penelope Cruz, Kristin Scott-Thomas and the director's brother, Ralph Fiennes. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is also a noncompetitive selection in the official line-up, as are Shane Black's Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, starring Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr; and Woody Allen's Match Point, with Allen, Scarlett Johansson, Brian Cox, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and James Nesbitt.
The kids gets in his picture
Glenn Lambert, a 17 year-old Dubliner, took top prize in this year's Irish Schools Film Competition at the Fresh Film Festival in Ennis, Co Clare. His film, The Vent, details the developing romance of a boy who listens to a teenage girl talking with her grandmother through a vent in a wall.
Chosen from over 150 films made by students from across the country, The Vent was described by the judges as "a film that displays both a knowledge of story with the technical skills to back up the production of that story".
Coincidentally, the director's brother, Jonathan Lambert, won the festival's top award in 2004 for his film, The Boy's Revenge. Former winners also include Conor MacMahon, whose first feature, Dead Meat, was released last year.
Serial killer for Fincher
Having toyed with several projects, including Mission Impossible III, since he finished Panic Room four years ago, David Fincher is now set to shoot Zodiac, a factually based thriller dealing with an elusive serial killer who terrorised San Fransisco from 1966 to 1978. Jake Gyllenhaal will play Robert Graysmith, the journalist and cartoonist on whose books the screenplay is based, with Robert Downey Jr as a fellow reporter and Mark Ruffalo as the homicide inspector in charge of the case.
Cinema du papa
One of the hot sellers at the annual MIP TV market in Cannes last week was The Jeweller's Shop, a 1988 movie for Italian television starring Burt Lancaster, Daniel Olbrychski, Ben Cross and Olivia Hussey. The revival of interest stems from the fact that it is based on a 1960 play written by Karol Wojtylya (under the pseudonym Andrzej Jawien) long before he became Pope John Paul II.
Beta Film chief Jan Mojto, who sold the film to TV companies around the world at MIP, said, "If there's a trend, then we're very much in it."
Canuck cinema on the go
North of Hollywood, a touring programme of new Canadian cinema, will play venues on the access Cinema circuit over the next three weeks. The films are Daniel Roby's La Peau Blanche, Scott Smith's Falling Angels, Deepa Mehta's The Republic of Love, and Gay Yates's Seven Times Lucky. See www.accesscinema.ie.
School daze
Further to last Friday's item on Irish winners at the recent Celtic Film and TV festival, Conor Mulhern's short film, The Big Girl, which won the award for best student fiction film, is a DIT film and not a National Film School production as stated here last week.
