Samir Farid sums up the greatest film event of the year The opening of the 64th round of the greatest film feast in the world saw Frédéric Mitterrand, the French Minister of Culture, standing before the Palais de Festival together with the festival director Thierry Fremaux, welcoming in -- among many others -- Woody Allen, the director of the opening film, Robert de Niro, the head of the feature film (official competition) jury, and Emir Kustarica, the head of the Un certain regard section. For the first time in the history the Cannes Festival, the administration decided to introduce a country as a guest of honour; they started with Egypt, chosen long before the revolution. The official statement praised the Egyptian people as capable of changing the course of history, however. In October Gilles Jacob, the head of the festival, as well as Fremaux, had asked me to put together a brief study of the history of Egyptian cinema and another about the history of Egyptian participation in the festival for publication on the festival site in Arabic as well as seven other languages as of 1 January. The first reveals that Egypt has one of the greater film industries in the world, while the second shows that, from 1946 to 1997, 14 Egyptian films participated in the official competition, three in Un certain regard, and five in the Directors' Fortnight -- as well as Bab Ash-Shams by Youssri Nassrallah and El-Banat Dol by Tahani Rashed, which were screened outside the competition. This number, 24, is almost equal to the total number of Arab films from outside Egypt screened at the festival during the same period. After the usual press conference there was a press conference with Bernardo Bertolucci, who participated four times in the official competition but never won -- a fact no doubt behind giving him the Palme of the Year; the same prize went to a number of artists who had participated but not won, including Ingmar Bergman and Youssef Chahine. In the Cannes Classics section, a new re-mastered copy of The Conformist (1970) is being screened. "Is there a cinematheque which, instead of my films, can refurbish me?" Bertolucci said on the occasion, adding that his Palme is an award for one long film made up of fragments of his filmography. He also announced that he will start shooting his next film in 3-D, a choice with which seeing Avatar inspired him. "I don't see why it has to be restricted to horror and science fiction. Imagine Fellini's Eight and a Half or Bergman's Persona in 3-D." But it was with the remains of A Trip to the Moon (1902) by George Melies (1861-1938), perhaps the first ever sci-fi flick, that the opening ceremony started, to celebrate Melies's 150th anniversary. On Thursday the official competition started with Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty, Lynne Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin (featuring the talented Tilda Swinton), and Maewen's Polisse. But it was the Italian master Nanni Moretti who, in Habemas Papam, offered the the competition its first major film. It is a departure in Moretti's trajectory since he also wrote the screenplay, and it is the first of his works to prove popular at the box office -- with Italian cinema goers flocking to its premiere days before the opening of Cannes. Habemas Papam, Latin for "We have a pope", is the statement with which the election of a new pope is announced from the terrace of the Vatican before the new pope addresses the people at the main square in Rome. The film opens with documentary footage of the funeral of Pope John Paul II; next we see the Conclave voting, a scene in which Moretti's trademark humour comes through: one cardinal is trying to sneak a peak at the his peer's choice; another prays that he will not be chosen. When the smoke in the Vatican chimney changes from black to white, we realise the choice has settled on Melville (Michel Piccoli), but no sooner is he introduced than he lets out a profound scream, to the astonishment of everyone; Moretti himself plays the psychiatrist who treats Melville, easing him into the papal seat, as it were, by the end of the film. Moretti manages to humanise the Conclave without offending Catholic sensibilities. The festival expressed solidarity with the Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasulov, who have been sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on working in cinema, with Panahi receiving the Directors' Fortnight prize and two Iranian films added to the programme at the last minute following a message from him on 5 May: Rasulov's Be omid e didar (in Un certain regard) and This Is Not A Film by Panahi with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, a documentary about Panahi's trial, as a special screening. Both are banned in Iran and the latter was produced secretly. In The Kid With A Bike, another important official competition offering, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne transcend their usual realistic style, expressing a new vision of life and human existence without recourse to abstraction. The drama is still believable enough: a boy looking for his father who has placed him at an orphanage and disappeared; when he finds him with the help of a simple middle-aged woman whom he meets by chance, the father rejects him completely. But it is unclear or unimportant where or when this happens. There is a city and a forest, with a petrol station between them. It is the perfect objective correlative of the vision contained within the film, which is ultimately closer to a fairy tale than anything rationally constructed. Whether it is the father's complete rejection of the son he begat, the woman's unconditional love for a son she has not given birth to, the story involves murder, death and resurrection, reversals of sentiment and an ending that evokes hope: ambiguity galore. Yet the climax of the competition was the screening of , an eternal gem of human creativity on a par with Dante's Divine Comedy or Abulalaa Al-Mi'arri's Rissalat Al-Ghufran. It would be unjust to himself as well as the film for a critic to write even a brief analysis of the film after a single viewing. Malick has absorbed the legacy of the heavenly religions in a profoundly human way, and he has assimilated the tradition of visual expression through light. Michel Hazanvicius's The Artist, on the other hand, is the 20th film on the official competition programme, to which it migrated from the fringe a few days before the opening of the festival. It had seemed as though the film was initially excluded so as not to have five French films in the competition, giving France a whole quarter while Italy, the USA and Japan have only two films each, with the rest of the countries featured represented by one film. On viewing the film, however, it turns out that it is English-speaking -- reason enough for the French to exclude it. Many films have dealt beautifully with the silent pictures, a period that lasted 40 years after the invention of cinema in 1895, as well as the issues incumbent on the transformation to sound, and The Artist, set in Hollywood at the start of the talking picture industry in 1927-31, is one such film. Hazanvicius chose to make it in the style of the silent pictures, filming in black and white and demonstrating a precise knowledge of this heritage at the same time. He even opted for the kind of melodramatic treatment that was prevalent in the time it depicts. * It is well to note that Fermaux is a major film historian and came to the festival from the Lumiere Museum research centre in Leon. He could therefore understand developments in Egypt through knowledge of films produced in the last decade: Youssef Chahine's Heyya Fawda, Youssri Nassrallah's Genenet El-Asmak and Kamla Abu- Zikri's Wahid Sifr, for example. But in addition to the guest-of-honour programme and the debates surrounding it (see "The counter choice"), it is well to note that on Friday 20 June, the festival is screening a Tribute to Tunis in the form of Mourad Ben Cheikh's feature-length documentary No More Fear.
