Cannes Unveils This Year's Goods

Cannes Film Festival chief Gilles Jacob on Tuesday unveiled the list of films that will compete for this year's Palme D'or award as well as those that will be shown in the Retrospective, Un Certain Regard, Short Films and Cinefondation presentations.

No major Hollywood studio film was listed in the competition category, the primary result, said Jacob, of the studios "not wanting to release the ones that were up to quality."

The four U.S. films that were selected are all indies, two of them from Miramax, James Gray's "The Yards" and James Ivory's "The Golden Bowl."

The other two are Neil Labute's "Nurse Betty" and the Coen Brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Remarkably, of the 23 films participating in the competition, seven are from Asia.

The American films "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her" by Rodrigo Garcia and "I Dreamed of Africa" by Hugh Hudson are set to open and close the Un Certain Regard screenings.

The festival opens on May 10 with a screening of Roland Joffe's "Vatel" starring Gerard Depardieu, Uma Thurman and Tim Roth.

Director Luc Besson will head the 9-member competition jury, which includes Jonathan Demme, Jeremy Irons, and Kristin Scott-Thomas.