Eric Lavallée

Among those they have tapped for the fest they have a premium Midnight Screening for Gilles Marchand's Black Heaven and they are closing the festival with Julie Bertuccelli's The Tree.

The French sales/production company is supplying this year's Cannes fest with a trio of titles, but you might find me doing cartwheels more for a project that hasn't even began lensing in Marjane Satrapi's Waiting for Azrael.

Compared with last year, Fortissmo Films come packing with only a single title, but that doesn't mean their sales agent won't be spending pretty much the entire festival from their rented office balcony. They signed a fairly ambitious deal with Fox - first time I've heard of a major studio outputting their titles to a films sales company of this nature and they've got one receiving a world preem at the festival in Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy.

Buyers and sellers in the film world will be pitching their latest titles in various meet and greet formats --the Cannes Market offers a bazillion different movie options. Some screenings are hush hush discreet, some are premieres from faltering divisions who could no longer keep the inventory and some are testing the market to find foreign buyers to pump more money back into the producer's pockets. If I were attending the market I'd be checking up on world preems of Marian Crisan's Morgen, Laurence Charpentier's Gigola and several of the promo reels, but those that should attract the most attention should be the following ten examples.

If at first two tries (The Fountain, The Fighter) you don't succeed, then try for the third time is where Darren Aronofsky is headed. I would have thought that the tenacious/stubborn Aronofsky would have dropped his working with Brad Pitt dream, but in the first major announcement at this year's Cannes film fest, the busy until 2017 Aronofsky has teamed with Focus Features to make something out of their deal with Random House book's film division.