Cannes film festival opts for global variety in 2010

Paris - With only one American movie and no Chinese films selected to compete for the Golden Palm, organizers of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival have opted to highlight cinema's global reach, the festival's general delegate, Thierry Fremaux, said
Thursday.
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Fremaux said that 13 countries will be presented in the competition for the festival's top prize. Two of those countries - Chad and Ukraine - will compete for the first time - Ukraine and Chad - showing that cinema has become "a planetary art."

The biggest surprise in the program presented Thursday in Paris was that the United States had only one representative, Doug Liman's Fair Game, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

Fair Game is based on the attempt by the administration of former US president George W Bush to discredit CIA agent Valerie Plame after her husband wrote an op-ed piece saying that officials manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Fremaux said that organizers had asked director Woody Allen to allow his new film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, to be in the running for the Golden Palm, but he had refused. The movie will therefore be screened out of competition.

Host country France has the most films in the competition, three, including Bertrand Tavernier's The Princess of Montpensier.

Among the Cannes veterans competing for the Golden Palm are England's Mike Leigh, with Another Year, and Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who will be showing Biutiful, starring Javier Bardem.

Fremaux said that in the coming days more films are likely to be added to the list of 16 movies vying for the big prize. He also said that this year's festival is the first to have been affected by the global economic crisis.

"It was the first time that the number of feature films submitted did not increase over the previous year," he said.

A total of 1,665 full-length movies were sent to festival organizers for this year's event, five fewer than for the 2009 festival, Fremaux said.

The 2010 Cannes Film Festival runs from May 12 to May 23.