It’s been rumoured for weeks, and now it’s finally been confirmed: Blindness, the new movie from the great Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, will open the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
The thriller, which stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo as residents of a city struck down by a sudden epidemic of blindness, will kick off the festival on May 14.
Closing the 61st Cannes Film Festival will be Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened?, the Hollywood-based comedy based on the memoirs of producer, Art Linson. The movie actually shot some scenes in Cannes after last year’s festival, while this year’s Jury President, Sean Penn, appears in the movie. Star Robert De Niro will present the Palme D’Or this year.
The presence of What Just Happened? - which co-stars Bruce Willis - will help assuage fears that this year’s festival might end up being a little low on star power, as will the addition to the official competition of James Gray’s Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
And in good news for Brits, director Steve McQueen (no relation, we’re presuming) has had his film, Hunger, an impressionistic account of the hunger strike of IRA member Bobby Sands, who died in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland in 1981, added to the Un Certain Regard line-up.