Fina Torres

Venezuelan director Fina Torres has a reputation for stylish, intelligent movies with a strong feminist twist. She debuted in 1985 with the French-produced Oriane, which took the Camera d'Or at that year's Cannes. She was in Cannes with her latest film Woman on Top starring Penelope Cruz.

• Fina Torres

Piers Handling

FilmFestivals.com met with Toronto festival director at Cannes who coined the event as a "huge meeting ground" and a "festival of premieres." Handling also talked about scouting for films in Cannes, Asian cinema and some of the strangest moments at the Toronto festival.

• Toronto as compared to Cannes • Toronto

Mark Herman

In Cannes presenting Purely Belter, Herman talked about the term, his past working in "bacon" and the music chosen for the film.

• Mark Herman

Melvin Van Peebles

Critics' Week featured a special "encounter" with Melvin Van Peebles - actor, musician, writer and journalist - who presened his latest made-in-France film shot in digital format, Le conte de ventre plein (Bellyful).

• Melvin Van Peebles

Good Housekeeping

I fell in love with these characters, what can I say?" says writer/director Frank Novak, about his outrageous satire, Good Housekeeping. Winner of the Grand Jury prize at Slamdance, it explores the white-trash life of loud-mouthed long-time married couple Don (Bob Miller) and Donatella (Petra Western). FilmFestivals.com met with Frank, Bob and Petra.

• Good Housekeeping Team

Serge le Peron

We are all guilty, myself more than the others," said Dostoyevsky in the introduction to "Crime and Punishment." The quote is used to set the stage for Serge Le Péron's L'Affaire Marcorelle, a psycho-drama featuring a prosecutor who suffers from nightmares and walks the line between dream and reality.

• Serge le Peron

Amos Kollek

Novelist, screenwriter, actor, documentarist, director, producer... no one knows the twists and turns of film-making, from the inside out, from concept to release, better than Amos Kollek. Born in 1947 in Jerusalem, Kollek has always gone his own way. He is in Cannes with competition film Fast Food, Fast Women starring AnnaThomson.

• Amos Kollek

Ryo Ishibashi

Star of Directors' Fortnight film Koroshi. The film tells the story of Yuhi Hamazaki (Ryo Ishibashi), a gentle and honest man ­ "a typical Japanese salaried man," says director Kobayashi ­ who gets laid off from his job during the recent Japanese recession. Ryo shared his thoughts about the character.

• Ryo Ishibashi

Oscar Roehler and Hannelore Elsner

Ten years after the fall of the Wall in Berlin, The Unapproachable is appropriate in helping to redress some of the imbalance in measuring the cross-border cultural significance of that historical event. Director Oscar Roehler and Actress Hannelore Elsner commented on the film.

• Hannelore Elsner • Oscar Roehler

Bernardo Bertolucci

Bernardo Bertolucci is the Critics' Week Godfather; he himself was brought into the limelight as a budding filmmaker in this selection with Prima Della Rivoluzione (Before the Revolution) in 1964.

• How did you become the Godfather of Critics' Week? •You left for China in the 80s. Why was that?

Christina Andreef

This Australian director, long-time assistant to Jane Campion, is in Cannes for the special screening of Soft Fruit, presented during the Critics' Week by FIPRESCI. She talked to us about Jane Campion, the Creteil Women's Film Fest, as well as the father/son relationship and the round-figured actresses in her film.

• Christina Andreef

How do you work with hundreds of sheep? It's not easy, ackowledged the 20-year-old Iranian director, whose second feature Blackboards was screened in official competition.

• Directing sheep as compared to human actors to advice from her father (Moshen), Samira expresses herself in English.

Claire Clouzot

Seven men and one woman -myself- screened 410 feature films for the 39th International Critic's Week at the Cannes Film Festival. We focused on first-timers and second-timers. It was exhausting, exciting, titillating and sometimes very brutal.

• Tell us about the committee and how many films were viewed? • Is there a re-occuring theme in the films? • Why are there so many women filmmakers in France as compared to elsewhere in the world? • Are there any American films in the selection this year?

Jeanne Labrune

French writer Jeanne Labrune (who wrote and directed the 1998 drama Si Je T'Aime, Prends Garde A Toi) wrote the screenplay for Vatel while Oscar-winning playwright Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare In Love) adapted the it for English audiences.

• What was your inspiration for the screenplay ? • Did you and Tom Stoppard write the sceenplay together? • What did you think of the final film cut?

Sabine Franel

For her first feature film, Le premier du nom, Sabine Franel left her post as editor (notably for docu-filmmaker Emile Weiss and Manoel de Oliveira) and put "thoughts into movement" tracing her family tree back to "the first to carry the name" (premier du nom). Being screened in the Certain Regard section, the 112-minute long film was produced by Humbert Balsan and is distributed by Pyramide.
Press contact: Nicole Lambert (in Cannes: 06 07 17 31 05)

• Tell us about your film and the role Judaism played? • What were your personal revelations while making this film and was the Holocaust an integral factor? • What was your reaction to being selected at Cannes? • Do you consider this film to be a film made by a woman?

Marie-Pierre Macia

This is her second year in charge of the selection Directors' Fortnight, which she shares with Jacques Gerber and Christine Ravet. Her ideal reason for selecting a film: "un coup de coeur", the process of falling in love with a film. "Every time you see something that's really good, your faith and hope are reborn. It happens all the time. My only real fear is of not spotting a film that's of superior quality."

• What is the specific orientation of the Directors' Fortnight? • What criteria do you apply when selecting a film? • How many women are represented in the selection?