You can't get away from voting today. But at the Cannes Film Festival, it's the star-studded jury for the Palme D'Or award which is under the spotlight. Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent, reports from Cannes.

While the minds of most Irish people are fixed on the outcome of today's general election, the focus of the 5,000-strong media presence at Cannes is on the vote of the nine-member jury that will select the winner of the festival's prestigious principal prize, the Palme d'Or, on Sunday week.

Cannes juries down the years have often produced decisions that have been baffling, apparently wilfully defying good taste and common sense, although there was a welcome exception last year when Nanni Moretti's universally admired The Son's Room took home the prize.

Anyone seeking illumination on this jury process will have been left wanting by the press conference held by this year's jury a few hours before the 55th Cannes Film Festival opened on Wednesday night.

"I've been in competition here before and I believe it's time the tables were turned," commented the jury president, David Lynch, himself a winner of the Palme d'Or for Wild At Heart in 1991 and best director last year for Mulholland Drive. "Reconciling the various personal opinions will be the most difficult task," he said. "The further people are apart, the harder it gets to reconcile all their views."

Lynch is joined on this year's jury by five other male directors - Claude Miller, Walter Salles, Raoul Ruiz, Regis Wargnier and Bille August, one of only four directors who has won the Palme d'Or twice; in his case for Pelle the Conqueror and The Best Intentions - and by three actresses who have doubled as producers - Crouching Tiger star Michelle Yeoh, the Indonesian Christine Hakim, and Sharon Stone, who attracted most of the questions at Wednesday's press gathering.

"I took a few years off to be a mother and then I was ill, so it's good to be coming back to movies by being on this jury of people I respect so much," she said. "I felt kind of silly at the photo call just now, having been away from the business for some time. I want to protect my talent differently when I go back to work. And I want to represent fairly women of my age. Being 40 is just an age like any other one."

From a record entry of 939 feature films, the festival has selected just 22 for the jury to consider this year, and as ever, the programme content is ripe for controversy. The German film industry is up in arms for being neglected yet again. The Asian content, which was so high-profile last year, has been scaled down radically. And the festival is burying the new Gaspar Noe movie, Irreversible, in an after-midnight slot next Thursday - unprecedented treatment for a film in competition. Noe's second feature after the disturbingly graphic Seul Contre Tous, the film features a nine-minute rape sequence, and the festival has stamped it with a warning that it may disturb viewers.

Of the 22 directors in competition this year, Noe is one of just eight who have not been in contention in the past for the Palme d'Or.

Many critics are grumbling that the competition's line-up of old boys is as predictable as it is conservative, but most are content to reserve judgment on a programme that offers the latest work of such formidable film-makers as Roman Polanski, Ken Loach, David Cronenberg, Olivier Assayas, Aki Kaurismaki, and the former Palme d'Or winners Mike Leigh, Abbas Kiarostami and brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, along with two talented young US directors, Paul Thomas Anderson,who made Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and Election director Alexander Payne.

The competition also includes films from Palestine and Israel - Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention has been joined by the last-minute selection of an Israeli entry, Amos Gitai's Kedma - but while both are firmly topical, neither is likely to create controversy. In fact, the festival describes them as "two manifestos of peace", and Suleiman and Gitai collaborated five years ago for a documentary on the peace initiative which earned Rabin and Arafat the Nobel Peace Prize.

The first of this year's competition films to be screened, Kedma had its world première at Cannes last night, just over three months after Gitai finished shooting it. It is set in early May 1948, a week before the British ended their mandate over Palestine and David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the independent state of Israel. The first third of the film is set aboard the cargo freighter named Kedma (meaning Towards the Orient) which is cramped with concentration camp survivors from all over Europe as it sails towards Palestine.

Passengers recount their individual experiences of oppression and prejudice before they row ashore to be beset by British soldiers lying in wait.

Following that skirmish, some of the immigrants escape into the hills where they come into conflict with Arab forces, and Gitai goes on to draw inescapable parallels with the present conflict in the Middle East. Kedma is a worthy film on the roots of that conflict, and it takes the view that both the Jews and the Palestinians are displaced peoples. Dialogue is minimal in this film which employs a rather obvious and meandering style that fails to pack the compelling dramatic charge of, for example, Gitai's recent Kadosh.

The festival's opening presentation on Wednesday night, Hollywood Ending, was, of course, shown out of competition in line with the consistent policy of its star, writer and director, Woody Allen. Based on the making of a film, it was a perfect Cannes opener in that every one of its numerous movie references and in-jokes were picked up by the first-night audience.

Allen stars as a neurotic New York film-maker, Val Waxman, a once-celebrated Oscar-winner whose reputation as a temperamental perfectionist has cost him his career, reducing him to making deodorant commercials in Alaska and losing out to Peter Bogdanovich when it comes to directing TV movies. His ex-wife (Tea Leoni) - who left him for a Hollywood studio chief (Treat Williams) - pushes for Val to be allowed a shot at a comeback with a $60 million Manhattan production, The City That Never Sleeps, but just as Val is about to shoot, his anxiety makes him psychosomatically blind. The running joke is that he goes through the whole process of directing a film without anyone noticing his very obvious blindness - one of many barbed commentaries Allen delivers on the nature of Hollywood film-making.

The movie features a profusion of very funny one-liners that take sideswipes at agents, actors, the pretensions of directors, the Hollywood obsession with profit and demographics, and the phoniness and fadishness of Los Angeles lifestyles.

The addition of many witty sight gags and broad slapstick add to the entertainment in a movie that is undermined by a surfeit of slack plotting and a running time, which, most unusually for Allen, is unwisely stretched out to just under two hours.

Coincidentally, last night's opening attraction in the main Cannes sidebar section, the Directors' Fortnight, also followed the making of a movie, but with a distinctly different agenda.

The film, Sex is Comedy, is the latest from the unabashedly frank French film-maker, Catherine Breillat, and it deals with the long, tense build-up to the shooting of a sex scene that deliberately echoes the seduction of a virginal schoolgirl by a young law student in Briellat's previous film, the sexually explicit À Ma Soeur! It even features the same actress, Roxane Mesquida, now cast as the actress playing the virgin.

In Sex is Comedy, the key character is the director of the low-budget film-within-the-film. Played by Anne Paillaud on fine form, she is demanding and manipulative, treating her actors like props on ths set - except when she has to coax away their inhibitions in the awkward sex scene between two actors who cannot stand each other. One of the actual props on the set is the prosthetic penis which the actor (Gregoire Colin) will wear in that scene, and italso serves as the source of the movie's line in edgy humour.

Colin is admirably deadpan in a movie where the director observes that while actors are nervous of "nude scenes", a term she loathes, she believes it is that which attracted them to the role in the first place and that actors like to be watched, even when they're simulating sex.

It is one of many candid commentaries on the nature of film-making in a movie which itself is diverting and ventures into areas where Woody Allen would never dare to go.

It's different in France.