Cannes Film Festival unveils 2011 lineup

Just as last year’s Cannes film festival winner, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, makes its debut in New Zealand at the World Cinema Showcase 2011, the contenders have been named for this year.

No other festival commands such attention in the film world and the announcement of its competition list  can now be viewed online from Paris. 

Among the heavyweight art-house directors chosen among the 19 for competition are Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar with La Piel que Habito (The Skin I Live In), about a plastic surgeon tracking down the men who raped his daughter, and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. He last featured at Cannes with Antichrist in 2009.

From America comes Terrence Malick's long-awaited The Tree of Life, which has become the odds-on favourite to win the Palme d’Or. It stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain. Set in the 1950s, it centres on a boy in the Midwest who grows up to be an adult lost in the modern world. Mallick won the Director's prize in 1978 for Days of Heaven. His last film, The New World, was released to obscurity in 2005.

Italy’s strongest entry is Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope), a comedy about the relationship between the newly elected pope and his therapist, starring Michel Piccoli and Moretti himself. Moretti’s The Son's Room won the best Palme d’Or in 2001.

Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be the Place has an American setting: Sean Penn plays a wealthy rock star, who comes out of retirement in Dublin to travel to the US in search of fugitive Nazis that persecuted his father.

Jodie Foster’s The Beaver, which stars Mel Gibson and features New Zealand Chinese actress Michelle Ang (My Wedding and Other Secrets), will show out of competition. Others in this category are Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (On Stranger Tides) and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which opens the festival.

Among English language entries, British director Lynne Ramsay makes her competition debut with We Need to Talk About Kevin, based on the best-selling novel by Lionel Shriver and starring Tilda Swinton, John C Reilly and Ezra Miller as Kevin. This is Ramsay’s first feature since Morvern Callar with Samantha Morton back in 2002.

Australian author-turned-director Julia Leigh also makes her Cannes debut with Sleeping Beauty, based on her own novel: a nightmarish thriller about a university student drugged and coerced into prostitution.

Restless, a new movie from American director Gus Van Sant, who won a Palme for his Columbine-inspired movie Elephant in 2003, will open the “Un Certain Regard” section of the festival.