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CANNES 2007 Out of competition

One for all, all for one

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"Cinema is a collective adventure," said Brazilian director Walter Salles in summing up the sense of the collective film Chacun son cinéma - To Each His Cinema, a project very much desired by the president of the Cannes Film Festival, Gilles Jacob, to celebrate the festival’s 60th anniversary.

Even more impressive than the 129-minute running time of the film – a collage of 33 three-minute shorts each directed by a different director – was seeing almost all the filmmakers at the film’s press conference. Cinema is over 100 years old and the room was filled with numerous representatives of its past 75 years, if we consider the fact that the first film by the oldest director, Theo Angelopoulos, dates back to 1931.

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One three filmmakers were missing of the 33, but it is worth listing them all (in alphabetical order): Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Bille August, Jane Campion, Youssef Chahine, Chen Kaige, Michael Cimino, Ethan & Joel Coen, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Manoel De Oliveira, Raymond Depardon, Atom Egoyan, Amos Gitai, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, Aki Kaurismaki, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, Andrei Konchalovsky, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Roman Polanski, Raoul Ruiz, Walter Salles, Elia Suleiman, Tsai Ming Liang, Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Wim Wenders, Wong Kar Wai and Zhang Yimou.

With the best of world cinema before them, Polanski provoked the press: "You journalists asked such modest questions on this rare occasion. Using computers must have lowered your level. You’re no longer interested in cinema, you don’t even need to write because you transfer with your mouse all the information on your article. That’s why you know nothing about us. So,” he said in closing, “let’s go eat!"

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(Translated from Italian)

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