Cannes: The curtains went up today on the 61st Cannes Film Festival with the screening of a poignant film that demonstrated to what extent the world of moviemaking has shrunk as the Bachchan family led the Indian quotient at the gala event. Blindness, the opening film produced by a Canadian, is Oscar-nominated Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles's screen adaptation of Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago's apocalyptic novel about a town struck by a mysterious epidemic that leads to everybody, except a doctor s wife, losing his eyesight.

Blindness, scripted by Canadian screenplay writer Don McKellar, stars American actors Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo and Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal. The world's most famed international film festival couldn t have opened with a more appropriate film. For the screening of Blindness, both Moore and Bernal were on the red carpet alongside the director of the critically acclaimed City of God .

As the festival progresses, given the line-up of big films in Competition, including Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che Guevara biopic , Clint Eastwood's new film Changeling , starring Angelina Jolie, and James Gray's Two Lovers , featuring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, many more stars will glitter on the Croisette and send the shutterbugs and fans into a tizzy.

The Indian glamour quotient this year will be provided primarily by the Bachchan clan, including the generally low-profile Jaya Bachchan. They flew into Cannes this afternoon to attend the Cannes opening -- no Cannes opening night gala has been complete without Aishwarya Rai ever since she walked the red carpet in the company of Bollywood Superstar Shahrukh Khan and Sanjay Leela Bhansali in 2002,the year Devdas was screened here.

Source : PTI