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Old hands, novice directors vie for Cannes diversity award

May 14, 2008, 14:54 GMT

Cannes - This year's Cannes Film Festival will shine the spotlight on 20 movies in its second most prestigious section with a host of veteran and at least six novice filmmakers competing for the Un Certain Regard prize. Apart from many French directors, filmmakers from Taiwan, Germany, the Palestinian Territories, Brazil, Mexico, China, Sweden, Britain and the United States give this section a truly global dimension. Director Steve McQueen's film, Hunger, focusing on the last six weeks of Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands' life at the Maze Prison, near Belfast, will open this section. McQueen won Britain's Turner Prize in 1999 with a video inspired by Buster Keaton and has co-written Hunger with Irish screenwriter and playwright Enda Walsh of Disco Pigs fame. The span of the movies on offer also includes novice Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir's Milh Hadha al-Bahr (Salt of This Sea), a romantic drama about a working-class woman and her experiences on travelling back home. Veteran US director Abel Ferrara's documentary Chelsea On the Rocks starring Ethan Hawke and Bijou Phillips is bound to grab the attention of moviegoers. The lure of the Japanese capital Tokyo will make its presence felt over the ocean when two movies screen in Cannes. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's highly-anticipated Tokyo Sonata and a collaborative work called Tokyo! by directors Bong Joon Ho, Leos Carax and France's Michael Gondry tell three separate tales of the metropolis. Tales from the northern hemisphere feature in O'Horten by Norwegian director Bent Hamer, who follows a train driver on an odyssey during his first days of retirement. The southern hemisphere takes centre stage when Brazilian actor-turned director Matheus Nachtergaele debuts with his movie A Festa da Menina Morta (The Dead Girl's Feast) while Mexican director Amat Escalante, winner of the International Federation of Film Critics Award (FIPRESCI) in 2005 for Sangre returns with a drama Los Bastardos. Created in 1978, Un Certain Regard focuses on current world cinema and a jury presided over by Turkish-German director Fatih Akin, who made waves in the main competition with his movie Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven) last year, will bestow the Un Certain Regard Prize for best film on young talents and possibly an award on two other films for innovative and daring works. The Tous les Cinemas du Monde section, which devoted two days to movies with the aim of highlighting the vitality and diversity of cinema across the globe in a range of features and shorts, will not take place this year in Cannes. But that does not detract from the range of films screening in other sections. The Cinefondation section encourages and supports young talents. Established in 1998, it supports the next generation of international filmmakers. This year a total of 17 movies will screen here and include Romanian director Ciprian Alexandrescu's drama Interior. Scara de bloc (Interior Bloc of Flats Hallway), Argentine director Marco Berger's El Reloj (The Watch) and Brazilian director Andre Lavaquial's O Som E O Resto (Sound and the Rest) about a humble man who finds himself becoming more and more involved with life and music as he wanders the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

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