It'll be hard to deny it: the Cannes Festival doth Iranian cinema love. Asghar Farhadi's "Everybody knows," which stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, will open this 71st edition, in a long tradition of showing deference to Iranian cinema. Jafar Panahi, under house arrest in Tehran by order of Iran's judicial courts (he won the top prize at Berlinale for his "Tehran Taxi" in 2015), has a horse in this race, too: his film is called "Three faces."

Is social media a waste of time, as David Remnick said? Maybe so. But Twitter, Instagram and the rest make keeping up with other people's lives easy and free. Where the Cannes festivalgoer is concerned, a spur-of-the-moment video on Instagram by a filmmaker can potentially add insight into what they're experiencing. At the same time, it's important not to lose touch of the fact that social media is often as vapid as it is useless

This year's Cannes Festival selection will be revealed during a press conference given in Paris on April 16th. At this time about a third of the contending films have been identified, according to the festival's general delegate (and programmer) Thierry Frémaux. A whopping 1,800 films have been submitted this year. "Everything happens in the next two weeks," Frémaux told the French National Assembly's Committee on Cultural Affairs on Wednesday here in Paris.

PARIS - A kind of good-humored anticipation is manifest inside UGC’s Normandie movie theater on the Champs Elysées: today we find out who the Cannes nominees are. I plop into a chair next to a friend, who, punctual as always, already found his seat. We come out of the theater about an hour later, our marching orders in hand. Eighteen films in the competition series, and eighteen other ones in the Un Certain Regard program.

Paris--Ever since the launching of French television network and film distributor CanalPlus in the early eighties (of which he was a central part) media capitan Pierre Lescure has led the charge in terms of edgy programming and driving audiences' expectations for top-notch entertainment ever higher. Whether it's entertainment or art (or both) and it is destined for the small or big screen or the stage, Lescure has had some hand in it these last three decades. Now, he wants the Cannes president job (2014 marks outgoing president Gilles Jacob's final year at the helm of the world's most famous film festival).

Power grab! Ooh la la ...

Sixty eight year-old Lescure, a businessman who holds stakes in a number of different media holdings, has chaired the jury of the Deauville American film festival

The Un Certain Regard (U.C.R.) program was officially launched during [...]

Screen Comment. Thank you for accepting to be interviewed for Screen Comment. I’d like you to talk to us about this 64th Cannes Film Festival, of course, but also about what cinema (and the Cannes Film Festival) mean to you. There is no career in the field more prestigious than yours. You are the General Delegate of the Festival and the Director of the Lumière Institute in Lyon. A few years ago, you even declined the position of Director of the Cinémathèque Française, the foremost film institution in the world. You were introduced to what in France is called the Seventh Art at a young age and from then on you never strayed far. Even your graduate dissertation is about cinema. In other words, one can say that you have almost always lived cinema and breathed cinema. Still, if you could see yourself having had a different career, what would it be (beside coach for the OL—the Lyon soccer team)?

Thierry Frémaux. I would have liked to be a writer and a gardener, both at the same time, actually. And I would also have liked to win the Tour de France.