Breeze of Arab Spring felt on Cannes red carpet

Last year around this time of France's Cannes film festival, movie producer Harvey Weinstein pondered how to turn a silent black-and-white film, "The Artist," into Oscar gold. His answer was to charm the socks off audiences with a simple tale of old Hollywood romance.    

This year, his Weinstein Co. has a different French movie on its hands with buddy comedy "The Intouchables," a box office smash around the world that opens in the United States on Friday with a race relations story that may not translate as easily for U.S. audiences.    

Racially-tinged buddy comedies have worked well at U.S. box offices in the past. Examples include "48 Hrs." with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte and more recently "Men in Black" with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. "Men in Black III" is expected to be a big hit this weekend when it opens.            

The ripples of the Arab Spring are being felt in summery Cannes, where films from Egypt and Syria, as well as a passionate documentary about the overthrow of Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, are being screened alongside the latest features from the world's heavyweight directors.  

Elsewhere at the festival, Arab filmmakers are telling stories  often against considerable odds.       

Bassam Chekhes is the first Syrian director ever to be in competition at Cannes, with his short film "Waiting for P.O. Box."       

The director said coming to Cannes was "a dream"  and a vital link to other filmmakers around the world.       

To have one film competing at the Cannes Film Festival is a privilege. To have two, Matthew McConaughey says, is wonderful good fortune  and the reward for a spell of hard labor in the trenches of independent cinema.      

In Lee Daniels' steamy Southern noir "The Paperboy," McConaughey plays a journalist who returns to his Florida hometown to investigate a murder.       

In Jeff Nichols' "Mud," which screened Saturday as the festival's final competition entry, he is a story-spinning fugitive holed up on an island in the Mississippi who is befriended by two local boys.       
"Mud", a touching coming-of-age tale set on the Mississippi River and starring Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon, brought the Cannes film festival competition to a close on Saturday, earning warm applause at a press screening.    

REUTERS/LBCI