The competition for prizes at the 62nd Festival de Cannes is top heavy with movies from international auteurs. The programme, announced at a press conference in Paris yesterday, includes Jane Campion's Bright Starfeaturing Ben Whishaw as poet John Keats; Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embracesstarring Penélope Cruz; Ken Loach's Looking for Eric, devised in collaboration with Eric Cantona; and Lars von Trier's take on the horror movie in Antichristwith Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Irish actor Michael Fassbender stars in Andrea Arnold's British drama Fish Tank, and he joins Brad Pitt in Quentin Tarantino's war movie Inglourious Basterds, which is also in competition.
The 20 Palme d'Or contenders include Michael Haneke's The White Tape, dealing with incipient fascism in 1913, Johnnie To's Vengeancewith French superstar Johnny Hallyday as a chef avenging his daughter's murder in Hong Kong, and Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, set against the background of the 1969 rock festival and starring Liev Schreiber, Emile Hirsch and Paul Dano.
Completing the competition line-up are new films from Jacques Audiard ( A Prophet), Gaspar Noe ( Enter the Void), Elia Suleiman ( The Time That Remains), Park Chan-wook ( Thirst), Lu Ye ( Spring Fever), Tsai Ming-Liang (Face), Isabel Coixet ( Map of the Sounds of Tokyo), Xavier Giannoli ( In the Beginning), Brilliante Mendoza ( Kinatay) and veterans Alain Resnais ( Les Herbes Folles) and Marco Bellocchio ( Vincere)
The festival opens with Disney's animated Upon May 13th, and closes with Dutch director Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinskyon May 24th. Both are showing out of competition, as are Sam Raimi's US horror-thriller Drag Me to Helland Terry Gilliam's travelling theatre company tale The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, starring Heath Ledger, who died when it was filming last year, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell.
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