Ireland is represented in the official selection at Cannes this year only by Neil Jordan's 14-minute Beckett adaptation, Not I in the International Critics' Week. However, the Irish film industry, North and South, is more high-profile than ever before at Cannes this year, now that the key film bodies have moved out of the maze of stands in the festival marketplace.
For the first time, there is an Irish pavilion, located on the Croisette, between the Italian and American pavilions. Open daily, it offers information on financing, tax breaks, locations and available distribution rights to interested international parties, and a meeting place for Irish producers. Complimentary wine and beer is served between 5 p.m. and 6.30 p.m.
The pavilion's co-ordinator is Andrew Reid, head of locations and information at the Northern Ireland Film Commission, which set up the initiative in partnership with the Irish Film Board, the Screen Commission of Ireland and Screen Training Ireland.
In Cannes last night the leading US film trade paper, Variety, hosted a party in honour of its choice of "10 producers to watch". One Irish producer made the list, Ed Guiney, whose current production is Disco Pigs. "Guiney has done more than his share to make the Irish film industry happen," Variety noted in its citation.
Guiney is in good company. The other producers selected included John Hart and Jeff Sharp, who made Boys Don't Cry; Laura Bickford, who is making Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas; Marion Macgowan, producer of the recent Australian hit, Two Hands; and Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger, who produced the acerbic US serious comedy, Election.
THE film Leonardo DiCaprio wants nobody to see is available for distribution sales at the market in Cannes. The black-and-white coming-of-age film, Don's Plum, features the Titanic star with Tobey Maguire, both of whom took legal action to block the film from being released, on the grounds that they never agreed to star in it as a full-length feature. The court ruled that the film could not be commercially released in the US and Canada, but could be sold outside North America.
Don's Plum is being sold by Trust Film Sales, the sales division of Danish director Lars von Trier's production company, Zentropa. Von Trier infamously responded petulantly at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival when he was awarded a minor prize by the jury chaired by Roman Polanski. Sarcastically thanking "the midget and his jury", von Trier kicked his scroll off the stage into the audience.
HAVING helped pioneer the low-budget, back-to-basics style of film-making advocated through the Dogme 95 initiative, Lars von Trier has turned his back on such no-frills productions and he's back in competition at Cannes next Wednesday night with the reputedly lavish musical, Dancer in the Dark, starring Bjork and Catherine Deneuve, and employing 100 video cameras simultaneously for some sequences.
Journalists interested in interviewing von Trier at Cannes this year have been advised that he is only doing group interviews a time-consuming distance away, at the all-frills Hotel du Cap in Antibes, probably the most expensive hotel in Europe. In the words of Sam Goldwyn, who knew more than a few things about making musicals, include me out.
BACK in the 1980s, the trade papers at Cannes were dominated by reams of advertising to promote projects produced by Menachem Golan, who first made his mark with the softcore Israeli sex comedy series, Lemon Popsicle. Golan's numerous publicity stunts included insisting that invited guests bring their passports for identification on entering his outrageously tacky Cannes party for King Solomon's Mines, featuring the then unknown Sharon Stone, and signing a contract on a hotel napkin for Jean-Luc Godard to direct a film of King Lear, which, with good reason, was barely released.
Golan is back at Cannes this year, plugging his latest production, Elian, which is dramatically described in adverts as "the Explosive Story of the Little Cuban Boy and the Mother who Drowned During their Escape to Freedom". The ad is illustrated by the widely-published photograph of a gun-wielding soldier taking young Elian Gonzales from the home of his Miami relatives. The movie will be ready for "September delivery", we are told. Fast work, indeed, but given Golan's track record, don't hold your breath.
READERS with access to TV5 have the opportunity to see what's happening at Cannes in TV5 Questions, which is broadcast daily from the festival at 3.15 p.m., Irish time. The 12-minute show offers interviews with actors and directors and behind-the-scenes footage and clips from the movies in competition.