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Up until May 2000, Björk was a well-known Icelandish rockstar, first with the band Sugarcubes in the mid-80s, and, as of 1993, as a solo performer. Cannes changed everything: the unpredictable choices of Croisette enfant terrible Lars von Trier had put Björk front and center in his musical drama Dancer in the Dark, and the result - including the customary quarrel between critics and festivaliers - was a Palme d'Or for von Trier for Best Film, and a Best Actress award for Björk.

Brazilian Fantastic and Horror film festival co-founder Otávio Lima is motivated by dystopia. He tells HFPA journalist Ana Maria Bahiana that a lot of films that were submitted to the festival - first in the country - bring attention to current events in Brazil.

Cary Grant brought a taste of Hollywood to the 1964 Cannes with Father Goose, in which he starred with Leslie Caron. In 2004 Cannes celebrated Grant in what would have been his 100th birthday (he had died in1986) with a premiere screening of the documentary Cary Grant: A Class Apart, with his widow Babara Grant in attendance.

In 1978 Richard Donner directed Superman with Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel. He said about working with Marlon Brando as Jor-El: “I obviously had prepared myself for the battle of a lifetime, because I’d heard so much about the problems one has with Brando, but it was just the opposite, I never had one moment of trouble with him.

Nigerian filmmaker Ozioma Ogbaji is the screenwriter behind the romantic comedy success Kambili: The Whole 30 Yards, currently seen on Netflix. But the 31-year-old writer is much more than that.

Jean-Jacques Annaud occupies a unique position. A rare French director with international stature and reputation.

In 1983, Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver made the pilgrimage to the Croisette to support Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously. The drama, set in mid-60s Indonesia, a country in a political crisis that would soon overthrow president Sukarno.

When Thierry Frémaux recently spoke to HFPA journalists, he touched on a wide range of subjects, from cinema to his twin lifelong passion for Judo and cycling.   Especially close to his heart are the two festivals he directs: the Lumière Film Festival, devoted to classic and restored films, which is held in Lyon each October, and of course the Cannes Film festival.

The Fourth of July weekend ended with a bang on several fronts. For the first time in the pandemic era, all top 10 movies in the North American box office chart made more than $1 million.

As the 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival gets underway, the view is very different from all the decades when the hustle and bustle started at least a week before the opening. It is truly a new era, a not quite post-pandemic one.