Film festival favourites return to Cannes for 2009 event

The Cannes Film Festival is welcoming a pantheon of favoured filmmakers returning to the French Riviera for its 62nd edition, which gets underway on Wednesday.

French actress Isabelle Huppert, chair of this year's jury awarding the festival's coveted Palme d'Or prize, and her colleagues face a strong line-up of contenders debuting on La Croisette over the next 12 days.

She and her jurors will be judging the latest works of film auteurs such as Lars von Trier, Ang Lee, Ken Loach, Pedro Almodovar, Quentin Tarantino, Lou Ye and Jane Campion — who have won acclaim at Cannes in the past. Altogether, 20 films will vie for the Palme d'Or, which will be awarded at the festival's close.

In a reversal from last year, when the festival opened with the bleak, Canadian co-produced drama Blindness, Cannes opens its 2009 event on an upbeat note Wednesday night with the Disney-Pixar film Up — which follows the adventures of a cranky widower and a young scout who fly away in a helium balloon-propelled house.

The choice of Up is a landmark decision for several reasons: it is the first animated movie ever to kick off Cannes as well as the festival's inaugural 3-D opener (viewers will be watching the film through special 3-D glasses).

"Sometimes, you feel like animation sits at the little kids' table," Up producer Jonas Rivera said in an interview.

"We just want to make films that people enjoy, so to be honoured with opening night at the festival, it feels a little bit like, 'OK, maybe somebody else sees that, too'…This is the big kids' table."

Notable films screening out of competition include Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the anticipated final screen role of the late Heath Ledger; Sam Raimi's return to horror film, Drag Me to Hell; and Michel Gondry's L'Epine dans le Coeur.

Canadians at Cannes: Barker animation, short film contest

Canada's National Film Board will be behind a host of events at Cannes this year, including the fifth annual Online Short Film Competition and the world premiere of Oscar-nominated Winnipeg filmmaker Cordell Barker's new animated short, Runaway (which debuts as part of International Critics' Week alongside Cannes).

The NFB, which is celebrating its 70th birthday this year, will also be honoured at the Marché du Film.

Denis Villeneuve's controversial film Polytechnique, two other Quebecois films and a Canadian co-production have also made it onto the lineup for the prestigious Directors' Fortnight festival, which is held in parallel with the Cannes festival.

Piers Handling, longtime director of the Toronto International Film Festival, has also travelled to Cannes to serve as a juror for the Un Certain Regard program, which celebrates younger filmmakers and innovative works.

Despite its lavish and glamorous reputation, the global economic crisis, budget cutbacks and a recession mindset have also spread to Cannes, with industry watchers expecting less flash and a more subdued event this year.

However, festival director Thierry Fremaux said he welcomed more restraint.

"Around Cannes, perhaps it was just too much sometimes, too much partying. This year perhaps we can think about the cinema, not the stars and the starlets and the excessiveness of Cannes but the emphasis on the films," he said in an interview with Reuters.

The festival closes on May 24 with Jan Kounen's film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky.