Movies, glamour, deal-making still reign at Cannes

Though some anticipated less glitz at the Cannes Film Festival this year, glamour still reigns at the venerable event, says Toronto film festival executive Cameron Bailey.

"The world economy may be in the toilet but there are still starlets on the beach, there are still people making deals. The players are all here. The big advertising signs are just all up and down the beach Cannes continues," Bailey told CBC Radio's Metro Morning on Friday.

Bailey, co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival,and his team have travelled to Cannes, as usual, to scour the event for films to screen at the upcoming edition of TIFF in September. (TIFF director Piers Handling is also serving as a juror for the Un Certain Regard program).

"We're looking for the best films we can see,"Bailey said.

"We all fan out and we see all the films that are here. We're looking for something that's gonna excite audiences," he said adding, however, that Cannes tends to focus on film auteurs.

Though Toronto's eventdoes love featuring famous directors, "we're also looking for films that are going to work with our audience. We did very well with Slumdog Millionaire last year. It's hard to imagine a film like Slumdog play[ing] in official competition at Cannes."

Already garnering buzz this year ahead of their debuts, Bailey said, were new films from Lars von Trier (Antichrist) and Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds).

"The combination of Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt, everyone's gonna want to see that one," Bailey quipped about the Pulp Fiction director's Second World War film.

Scorsese expands restoration initiative

Apart from the screenings, deal-making and overall movie-promoting, Cannes often serves as a platform to announce new film-related initiatives.

On Friday, Oscar-winning director and ferventfilm-preservation advocate Martin Scorsese announced a plan to widen the films restored by his World Cinema Foundation.

The foundation has begun a project to make movies from developing countries more accessible to the world, via its own website and online retailers Netflix and iTunes. These movie titles will eventually become DVD box sets produced under the Criterion Collection label.

"We can make a difference," Scorsese said, lamenting the deterioration of rarely seen classics from around the globe amid the current proliferation of action blockbusters.

"If we make these films available, there's going to be someone out there who's going to be affected by them. If we hit one out of 100 or one out of 1,000, we've done something, and maybe there aren't that many Terminators afterward," he said.

The Cannes film festival continues through May 24.