American actress Demi Moore waves to photographers as she emerges from a shop in Cannes, where the 50th film festival opens.

CANNES: As it celebrates its 50th year, the Cannes Film Festival, seems to be turning into a youth movement, with some first-time directors vying for the coveted Palme d'Or or Golden Palm.

Whereas last year's competition involved such proven talents as the Coen brothers and Mike Leigh, both previous Cannes prize-winners, this year finds first-time directors Johnny Depp and Gary Oldman vying for the gold. Each actor will be represented by his film-directing debut – Depp's The Brave and Oldman's Nil by Mouth. The science-fiction film The Fifth Element, starring Oldman and Bruce Willis, kicks off Cannes' 50th birthday party Wednesday night.

As usual, it should be quite a party, the main drag by the Riviera, with Willis, John Malkovich, and Robin Williams among the celebrities feeding the media frenzy.

So what will be this year's La Dolce Vita or Taxi Driver or even The birds, the bees, and the Italians; the big winner in 1966?

It won't be Fifth Element although it boasts a French director, Luc Besson, who has been shown several times previously at Cannes, the buzz on his newest is that it is a blunder.

Both Besson's film and Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power, the closing-night selection and another movie underwhelmingly received in the United States are being shown outside the official competition, and are ineligible for prizes. Unlikely to leave without a laurel is Welcome to Sarajevo, English director Michael Winterbottom's searing account of the war in Bosnia and the travails of a British journalist who smuggles a Bosnian girl out of the country.

The world premiere screening of the film May Two in London prompted applause and tears from an industry audience. Though the same conflict was at the heart of the 1995 recipient of the Golden Palm, Emir Kusturica's Underground, Winterbottom shows how in the hands of an artist no situation ever goes stale.

Among films arousing expectations but unavailable for pre-Cannes viewings were The ice storm, with Kevin Kline, Taiwanese director Ang Lee's first film since the Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility The Sweet Hereafter by Canadian director Atom Egoyan and Michael Haneke's Funny Games, a film about terrorism that is the first Austrian entry for 35 years. This year, Cannes looks to make headlines as much for who doesn't show up as who does.

Eastwood, a French favourite who has served as president of the jury, sent regrets for the closing night, citing a prior commitment involving his new film, Midnight in the garden of good and evil.

Ingmar Bergman, 78, won't be traveling in person to accept his Palme des Palmes for the greatest of all Cannes prize-winners (perhaps he's still piqued that The seventh seal, one of his masterpieces, lost out in 1957 to William Wyler's Friendly persuasion).

Two films Keep Cool'Abbas Kiarostami's The taste of cherry have encountered resistance from his home country of Iran.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.