It's the final day of the Cannes film festival and the heaving crowds that have swamped the city for the past 10 days have thinned out. Seated at the now nearly deserted bar at the Grand Hotel, Laurent Cantet - whose film The Class premiered the previous day - is fielding questions from the few journalists who have elected to stay for the awards ceremony.
As the French filmmaker's interpreter goes to work on another of his long answers, one of his publicists brings over a copy of the day's Metro. Cantet grins: the paper, the most widely read publication during the festival, has predicted that The Class should - and will - win the Palme d'Or.
It's a surprise prediction, given how this year's festival includes a mixture of work from old masters such as Clint Eastwood (taut suspense thriller The Exchange) and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (aiming for their third Palme d'Or with realist drama The Silence of Lorna), with offerings by young upstarts such as Matteo Garrone (Gomorra, a gritty chronicle of Neapolitan gangs) and Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary about the Israeli army's role in the massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in 1982).
Eight hours after our meeting, it's Cantet to whom Robert De Niro presents the Palme d'Or. The director is followed onto the stage by his army of teenage actors who play students in his film about a year in the life of a high school in Paris' 20th arrondissement. It seems an apt way to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the mid-festival shutdown in 1968 by filmmakers eager to show support for student activists in Paris.
The spectre of May 1968 haunted the festival for months, with many expecting the event to be heavily politicised.
The decision of the festival's general delegate, Thierry Fremaux, to present some of the films that failed to make it to the event's screens because of the disruption 40 years ago heightened expectations of a rekindling of the political spirit of 1968, as did the appointment of outspoken actor Sean Penn as president of the jury.
