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On Wednesday, the UK’s Ken Loach tried to match the success of ‘The Hurt Locker’ movie at the Oscars after he entered his own film about the war in Iraq into the battle for the top prize in Cannes.

His movie ‘Route Irish’ got its title from the most perilous road stretch in the war-torn nation that connects the airport to the Green Zone in Baghdad, The film will have a screening for the press at the French Riviera film festival a day prior to its premiere on the red carpet.

Scooping the top award at Cannes back in 2006 with his movie about Ireland’s struggle for freedom from the British, Loach decided to enter ‘Route Irish’ in Cannes several days before the actual start of the festival last week.

The movie follows the life of two former soldiers from Britain who went to Iraq to work as private security contractors.

After one of them gets killed on Route Irish because of suspicious circumstances, the other one, struck with guilt, refuses to accept the official explanation regarding the incident and attempts to discover the truth about what really happened.

Loach’s film is among the 19 movies battling for the Palme d’Or to be awarded on Sunday. Last year, he also went for the top award at Cannes with the film ‘Looking for Eric’.

Loach is one of the two British directors competing for the award this year. The other is Mike Leigh, who is the director of the entry ‘Another Year’.

Fans, celebrities and other personalities from the film industry gathered together in Cannes, France, as the world renowned film fest kicked off today.

Deck chairs were positioned to face the waterfront palace, which will be the centre of activity for the 63rd film fest, which will tackle issues such as the Iraq war to the global fiscal crisis.

The beach was filled with tents set up by industry representatives to promote their own reels. Preparations are also being done at the festival’s main hub to brace for the arrival of famous names like Cate Blanchett and Russell Crowe.

Blanchett and Crowe appear in the movie ‘Robin Hood’, which will mark the first screening of the film fest. The two are both deemed as the driving forces behind the big turn-out in terms of spectatorship. This is a positive note over criticisms, saying that this year’s entries are no better than past line-ups.

Aside from the Robin Hood film and ‘Wall Street 2’ by Oliver Stone, independent names and major production houses are mostly included. Some of them are Ken Loach from the UK and Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami.

The only film made by an American is Doug Lima‘s ‘Fair Game’, which revolves around a CIA agent’s struggle while working for the former US government.

Meanwhile, one of the things critics have been pointing at this year’s billing is the lack of women film makers. Host Kristin Scott Thomas of today’s gala opening reacted to this, saying, “I think that’s a pity”.

She continued, “You don’t choose a film because it’s made by a woman, you choose it because it’s good”.

A film set to compete at the Cannes film festival has sparked controversy ahead of its official screening.

‘Outside of the Law’, directed by Rachid Bouchareb, has been censured by critics for apparently trying to rewrite the history linking France to its former North African colony of Algeria. Calls have been made for the banning of the film, as politicians joined in on the dispute on Tuesday.

The film is about two brothers who survive the massacre at Setif, an Algerian town which is the site of a violent clash between nationalist rioters and French forces in May 1945, and the subsequent events as they take part in the fight for Algerian independence.

MP Lionnel Luca from the ruling UMP party denounced the film as a ‘negationist’ revision of history, particularly on the issue of who the true instigators of the clash were—the Muslims or the Europeans.

Claiming that he had based his opinion on a script summary supplied by the government, Luca, however, admitted that he had not yet seen the movie.

Born to Algerian parents in France, Bouchareb told the Algerian newspaper El Watan that the movie aimed to “shed light on this part of history common to both countries”.

Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand expressed his views regarding the issue on Tuesday, saying: “Debate about the tragedy of the Algerian war is healthy. It helps us to reconstruct an essential thread of our recent past”.

He added: “I note that most of the people talking about the film have not seen it. I will see it myself very soon to form an opinion”.

The history of the success of Asian cinema at the Cannes Film Festival proved that films from that side of the planet have been much applauded in this most prestigious film gathering in the world, and it may continue in the 63rd year of the film festival.

The celebrated Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and Chen Kaige of China are both previous winners whose fame were topped by the attention that they earned in France. For this year, the festival organizers chose five different films from Asia as part of the 18 selections of movies that will vie for the highest award to be given in Cannes, known as the Palme d’Or.

The festival is scheduled to begin on 12 May and will continue until 23 May.

Included in the selected films is a movie created by a Thai filmmaker who is practically unknown outside the arthouse film circuit of the world, as well as movies from three directors who were hailed as festival favourites in the previous years.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a 2004 Cannes Jury Prize winner with ‘Tropical Malady’, re-entered the festival with a Spanish-German-French-British co-production titled ‘Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives’.

On the other hand, Im Sang-soo from South Korea will showcase ‘The Housemaid’ while Lee Chang-dong, also from the same country, will exhibit ‘Poetry’. Both of them have been favourites in the arthouse circuit from the past, as well as Japan’s Takeshi Kaneshiro, whose entry ‘Outrage’, is considered to be in the running for the top award.

The Palme D’Or field is completed by ‘Chongqing Blues’ from China’s Wang Xiaoshuai.

The Palme D’or jury will be led by renowned American filmmaker Tim Burton.