That other great big film festival announced its main program at a press conference in Paris on Thursday morning. Among the many auteurs regularly favoured by the Cannes film festival returning with new films this year is Atom Egoyan. The Innis College prof and the recent recipient of a humanitarian arts prize worth $1 million (alas, he had to share it with Tom Stoppard and Amos Oz) is back with Adoration, a locally shot drama that integrates favourites themes like alienation and identity with such contemporary phenomena as social-networking sites and terror-plot paranoia. Scott Speedman and Rachel Blanchard star.

Another much-anticipated feature with a big local connection — a long-in-the-works adaptation of Jose Saramago’s Blindness, written by Don McKellar, co-produced by Rhombus Media and directed by Fernando Mireilles (City of God, The Constant Gardner) — was not announced for the competition slate despite being widely expected to have a berth. Since the opening and closing slots have yet to be announced, it could still be in the running. Hard to believe it would be overlooked given its distinguished literary pedigree and a prestigious cast that includes Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal, Mark Ruffalo, Sandra Oh and, yes, Don McKellar.

Also making news was the relative lack of big-time Hollywood offerings — no new Coens or Fincher, but Cannes does have Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (no relation to the George C. Scott Canucksploitation ghost story), Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, and all four hours of Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevara bio-pic starring Benicio Del Toro. Woody Allen’s Spain-set Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the previously announced Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Kung Fu Panda also make their world premieres.

Otherwise, the most promising Cannes fare falls into some regular categories: new works by trusty auteurs (e.g., Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Arnaud Desplechin, Jia Zhang-ke, Raymond Depardon, the Dardenne brothers); first-time competition berths for upstart filmmakers (e.g., Eric Khoo, Brillante Mendoza, Pablo Trapero); curiosities (a serial-killer thriller by Jennifer Lynch, a western by Korean maverick Kim Jee-woon, James Toback’s portrait of his buddy Mike Tyson); and something by Wong Kar-wai (the long-promised redux/re-edit of his 1994 existential swordplay epic Ashes of Time).

EYE WEEKLY’s daily online coverage starts May 14. We can smell the fresh baguettes already.

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