Eric Lavallée

After utilizing the festival as an autumn showcase for such tentpole films as Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution, it didn't take much foresight to see that Focus Features were looking to score a spot for a film that was unintentionally skipping out on Cannes.

A common meeting place for auteur cinema, a special film was designed to recall the history of the section with testimonies from a who's who of favorite directors in Todd Haynes, Jacques Rozier, Costa Gavras, Michael Raeburn, Ken Loach, Alain Tanner, Carlos Diegues, Werner Herzog, Theo Angelopoulos, André Téchiné, Chantal Akerman, the Taviani brothers, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Yousry Nasrallah, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Atom Egoyan, Michael Haneke, Peter Sellars, Naomi Kawase, Manoel de Oliveira, the Dardenne brothers, Stephen Frears, Sofia Coppola, Eric Khoo, Kim Rossi Stuart, Lisandro Alonso, Christophe Honoré, Bong Joon-Ho, William Friedkin and Jacques Nolot.

Critic’s Week is a smaller-in-scope, parallel event that might come across as Cannes' least desirable, but the fact is: this is a sidebar that manages to offer some solid debut and second time efforts. Last year, the Espace Miramar (a serious walk from the traffic jams of the festival core) was overwhelmed by salivating fans awaiting the solo screening for Gael Garcia Bernal debut film Déficit,

One more case of a short film successfully serving as a template for a feature length project, IFC Films have taken the domestic rights to Strangers – an import that played well at Sundance and will get a second viewing at the Tribeca in a couple of days from now.

Apart from film examples such as The Band's Visit, Munyurangabo (Liberation Day) and Terror's Advocate, last year’s Un Certain Regard Section had its share of misfires – films that took the experimental route but felt more like - old bath tub water.