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When in Cannes

Day 1: Wednesday 10 May

The Croisette was under a cloudy, gray rain for most of the Opening Day of the 53rd Cannes Film Festival yet nothing could dampen the arrival thousands of producers, directors, distributors, publicists, celebrities and their film fans to this annual cinema Mecca.

The crowds flowed in all day; the publicists who had been in place since last Friday making sure the paparazzi were out in force for their clients as noticed by the arrival yesterday of Jean Claude van Damme at the Nice airport. Although the plane was full of stars, including Calista Flockhart and Kathy Baker (Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her), Morgan Freeman (Under Suspicion) and Claudia Schiffer (for Revlon), it was van Damme, in town to promote his new film (Replicant), who set off the flurry of photographers in a harbinger of things to come during this star-studded event.

Indeed, the quay in front of the Palais was already crowded with paparazzi by nine Wednesday morning as they staked out their vantage points, and while contractors were still building the red carpet runway throughout the day, it was done in time to welcome the hundreds of stars and film goers attending the Opening Night screening of Roland Jaffe's Vatel (starring Gerard Depardieu, Tim Roth, and Uma Thurman who was rumored to have demanded she be flown over on the Concorde with her children and nanny in tow). Vatel is Joffe's almost-personal tale of perfectionism set in the French court of Prince de Conde in 1671. The film casts Depardieu as Francois Vatel, the proud and faithful valet who is put in charge of Conde's desperate last attempt to regain the favor of Louis XIV by throwing the perfect three-day feast.

Other spots along the beach were not quite as ready, as the American Pavilion and nearly all the market booths worked feverishly to be completed by Thursday morning when the business end of the Festival gets under way. Hotel balconies along the beachfront are rapidly filling up with huge banners as distributors, studios and film companies announce their locations, and the market continues to spill out in all directions as tents are erected on the sand at beaches edge to serve as temporary offices for dozens of film related companies.

A beefed up security presence can be felt on every corner of Cannes as literally hundreds of police have been added in anticipation of not only Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's attendance (the first time a PM has attended the Festival) at Opening Night, but also to keep out "parasitic" promotional events that are not film related: It explains the cancellation of a planned promotion to parade Victoria Secret models up and down the Croisette dressed in their underwear.

PM Jospin also gave the closing speech at The Cinema of Tomorrow-International Symposium, co-sponsored by Le Monde and hosted by president Isabelle Huppert. Intended to address the issue of the future of cinema and the new technology, the symposium guests included filmmakers Wim Wenders, Atom Egoyan, Yousseif Chahine, Thomas Winterberg, Erick Zonca, Sydney Lumet, Brian de Palma and Sam Mendes among others.

Wenders spoke of the "explosion of possibilities" for filmmakers today and Winterberg, who first admitted to using the digital medium on The Celebration (made under the Dogma banner) because of financial considerations, admitted the smallness of his camera lead to greater creative possibilities when he was shooting. All the filmmakers were quick to tell the audience not to be afraid of the coming technology, although they also addressed the problems of exhibition by insisting that nothing would change the sense of community found in the shared audience environment of a darken movie house. Two new Dogma films are in the Official Selection this year at Cannes: The Magician's Room (Director Claude Miller) and Lovers (Director Marc Barr).

Looking forward to Thursday, the controversy over China's demand that Jiang Wen's Guizi Lai Le (Devils on the Doorstep) be pulled from the Festival continues as the film's distributors, Fortissimo Films from Holland, assure its screening is confirmed. The Indies meet Hollywood in the Coen Brothers new film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? starring George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson whose directorial feature film debut, Eye of God (Martha Plimpton) won the American Indie Award in 1998.