Cannes Diary: It's Che Vs Changling
It's the most coveted award any film can receive, more prestigious than the Oscar, some will say.
Winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes has almost always resulted in that film going on to earn cult status, as Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver and Pulp Fiction will prove.
So it's no no surprise then that although it's only Day One at the Festival, early favourites are already being discussed.
Steven Soderbergh's Che, an anthology of two films on the life of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara is being tipped as a sure shot Palme d'Or contender, despite its daunting four-hour-plus running time.
All eyes are also on Clint Eastwood's Changeling, about a mother who begins to doubt that the child who has been returned to her after a kidnap is really her own. The film starring Angelina Jolie is set in 1920s America.
Celebrated Brazilian director Walter Salles whose Motorcyle Diaries was a contender in 2004, returns to Cannes this year with Linha de Passe, about the lives of four brothers from a tough background in Sao Paulo who struggle to overcome their circumstances.
The festival opens on Wednesday with Fernando Meirelle's Blindness, an adaptation of the Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago's novel about a city in which 90 per cent of the population goes blind.
Meirelles, the director of such acclaimed films as City of God and The Constant Gardener is being tipped as another probable winner.
Also hot on popularity charts are the Dardenne brothers who have twice won the Palme D'Or — for Rosetta and L'enfant — and who return this year to attempt a hat-trick with The Silence of Lorna.
For every gem that has been unearthed at Cannes, there are masterpieces that have been overlooked. Oscar-winning German film The Lives of Others was rejected by the Festival, and critical and commercial hit No Country For Old Men which took Best Picture at the Academy Awards recently won no prizes at Cannes last year.
It can't be an easy job for the jury to pick not only a film of outstanding cinematic merit, but a choice that pleases everybody
