TRAFFIC GROUND to a halt and hundreds of onlookers gathered in the warm sunshine to spot the stars arriving at the opening of the 61st Festival de Cannes last night.
Pride of place went to contemporary thriller Blindness, which was selected to open the festival.
Gendarmes lined the steps and photographers in evening dress took up their positions as the film's Brazilian director, Fernando Meirelles, led his international cast up the red carpet, among them Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal and Mark Ruffalo.
The movie started the festival on a downbeat theme, as it charts the consequences when the world is struck with an epidemic of "white blindness" and the population turns to primitive methods to survive.
The mood will be at least as sombre tonight when the festival's official sidebar section, Un Certain Regard, opens with the world premiere of Hunger, which deals with the last six weeks in the life of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
The first feature film directed by Steve McQueen, a Turner Prize-winning English artist, it features German-born and Killarney-raised actor Michael Fassbender as Sands. Dublin actor Liam Cunningham plays a priest who visits him in the Maze Prison.
The screenplay for Hungeris by Enda Walsh, the Irish playwright of Disco Pigs, Bedboundand The Walworth Farce. Walsh says: "Very simply, it made me question what I believed in in the world. I acknowledge and respect these people's belief in something. It is this that should have universal relevance."
The film, which was announced at Cannes last year, was funded by Channel 4, Northern Ireland Screen and the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland.
Even before the official opening of Cannes 2008 last night, the crowded festival market was open for business with screenings under way from early morning to attract film distributors worldwide.
One of the first films to be shown in the market yesterday was the romantic comedy Waiting for Dublin, featuring US actor Andrew Keegan and Irish actors Hugh O'Conor and Jade Yourell.
With 4,300 international journalists registered, Cannes is a magnet for publicity. US company DreamWorks got in early yesterday when actor Jack Black arrived by water taxi at the pier of the Carlton hotel, where he was greeted by 40 people dressed as pandas.
The promotion was set up to publicise the animated cartoon comedy, Kung Fu Panda, for which Black provides the voice for the title character, an obese panda who dreams of being a kung-fu warrior. The film has its world premiere tonight, when Black will be joined on the red carpet by fellow members of the voice cast, including Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie and Lucy Liu.
The Kung Fu Pandapremiere however clashes head-on with the first screening of Hunger.