Actor Tommy Lee Jones is in the competition as a director with “The Homesman,” which he also stars in alongside Hilary Swank. This is Jones’ second theatrical feature as a director; his first film, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” also premiered in the Cannes competition in 2005: The film won a screenplay award and Jones walked away with the best actor prize. 
Canadian Atom Egoyan won the Grand Prize in 1997 for “The Sweet Hereafter.” This year he’s back with “Captive.” Olivier Assayas had a few trips up the red carpet with films in the competition. “Clean” won acting honors for Maggie Cheung in 2004. Now he’s back with “Sils Maria,” with Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart.
In addition to the more than 80 feature films (a very loose count) in the various sections –Compétition, Un Certain Regard, Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, Semaine de la Critique, and those films that, for various reasons, show up out of competition, there’s a world of media and images at the Festival de Cannes. From press kit photos to the paparazzi pix and shots from the red carpet, there’s an official photograph overload. But go to the festival’s website and look for a section titled Hors-champ and you will find, among a selection of shots of festival preparation – the streets of Cannes before opening night, and some great candid photos taken by M. Gilles Jacob - a wonderful series of line drawings (“trait continu”) signed by the artist Dgé Paris (Geraldine Goldenstern Demey), who has drawn a veritable picture-book story of off-camera moments in and around the festival. After the festival ended, we met in Paris to talk about her style, her art, and how she came to tell the “off-camera” story of the festival.
She’s a self-taught artist whose work also includes sculptural pieces. And even before Cannes, she was showing her work in the Muriel Guépin Gallery in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood. (The gallery has since relocated to Manhattan) Now that Brooklyn is the hippest place in the universe, one could say she was well ahead of the trend! She has also worked in the theater – one of her first jobs in France was as an assistant for a stage director. It was there (trying to figure out a way to present weekly reports) that she began to hone her sketching style. She found that theater is linked to cinema, especially in the way the teams work: very intense work, very focused – working for concentrated period of time with a new family, of sorts.
And it is in cinema where she does much of her work now – mostly as a script consultant, although she works for the Festival de Cannes for a few months a year. And so it was that she “drew” the festival – on her lunch hour, in the evenings. While we call her work line drawings, she has a spontaneous style that is almost like poetry: She does not look at her paper or her pen, but at the scene before her, that she wants to describe. And since she is also a writer (she has written poems and short stories), she creates poetic descriptions for each drawing. Although each illustration is accompanied by text, the pictures by themselves form a sort of narrative of their own. These fabulous festival drawings – of a press conference, of a security guard, of an old section of Cannes, away from the glitz of the Croisette – also create a diary; one drawing for each day of the festival.
Director Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive):
Of the many questions Alexander Payne's Nebraska raises about American individualism, the most urgent is, How to rein in Bruce Dern's unruly grey hair? On deeper reflection, the answer has to be: you don't. That wiry growth is his mane.
Dern plays Woody Grant, a grizzled Midwesterner whose driving privileges and lucidity have gone the way of the mustang. Woody has been bucking for the cause of freedom as far back as the Korean War. Now freedom's frontier cuts through Lincoln, Nebraska, where the Montana resident believes a million-dollar sweepstakes prize -- and the independence it'd buy him -- are his for the taking. First and foremost, it'd bankroll the truck he has long coveted.
Try as he might, Woody's son David (Will Forte) can't convince the boozy old crank that the whole prize thing's a sham. As much to establish a connection with his dad as to settle his own lonely heart, "Davy" takes time out from selling electronics to drive Woody to his manifest destiny. Along the way, they make a stop in their native Nebraskan hamlet, where the shadow of the Grant clan looms thickly across the heartland. We're in solid Payne territory here, a soybean's throw from the birthplace of the TV dinner.
As Payne recalled at the New York Film Festival press screening, veteran cinematographer Haskell Wexler likened Phedon Papamichael's black-and-white work on Nebraska to a moving Ansel Adam photograph. But just imagine the garishness that would have registered in color.
It's often grumbled about Payne's prairie portraits such as About Schmidt and Omaha that he condescends to his
folksy subjects. Working off a screenplay by South Dakota-reared Bob Nelson, Omaha-reared Payne claims his birthright to ferment the tone. If Payne were less deft at extracting comedy, his commentary might be too stacked to avoid sinking into a lament.
There is pointed social criticism in Nebraska's parody of what has become of the pioneer family ethos. Take for example the scene in which Woody and Davy reunite with the extended family. Davy's cousins can't get over what a pokey driver their wussy visitor is. For them, the true measure of a man is his car's odometer -- who rides the fastest horse -- though judging by their beefy girths lord knows when they last hulked from the den couch to the garage.
As the film clouds over, kin and kith alike lay claim to Woody's prospective fortune like so many vultures swarming the rural skies. Individual greed will plow through these hallowed bonds and leave the myth of small-town cohesion in tatters.
Yet if the film is prone to smirking, it also revels in small kindnesses. An especially tender one comes from Peg Nagy (Angela McEwan) at the local newspaper. As Woody's former sweetheart, she has stories for Davy that enable him 
to better understand and accept his dad: that he was shot down in Korea; that he was "always a little confused"; and that he swooned over Davy's spirited mother Kate (a show-stealing June Squibb). Like Davy, we can't help but take heart in Peg's considerably more romantic version of his parents' relationship than Woody had earlier imparted. (On why he wanted kids with Kate he'd explained, "I liked to screw and she was Catholic, so you do the math.”)
