The Times
By Elizabeth Ayre

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To be on the jury of a international film festival - and Cannes is, of course, the greatest - is rather like serving with M15. with an implicit understanding that the inner secrects of the jury room will go with you to the grave. A few years ago, Kirk Duglas broke the vows and dished the dirt on a particularly acrimonious Cannes jury experience. Since then, he his been held in much the same regard by festivals asPeter Wright is in Mrs. Thatcher's Cabinet.

The secrecy inevitably breeds endless speculation and rumour, the mythology of the Cannes festival includes it rich apocrypha about the dramas and political pressures - how one jury succured to terrorist death threats and handed the prize to an Arab film; the vicious in-fight between Padre Padrone and A Special Day killed Roberto Rossellini (he died of a heart attack a day or two after completing his stint as jury president). This year was no exception to the rule of rumour. The morning after the awards ceremony, I heardand read circumstantial stories of how we had been locked up and given an ultimatum that a certain film had to have the Grand Prix; how only counter-threats of strife and scandal saved the day. Since these stories have no shred of truth in them, I am sadly obliged to discard all the colourful tales that have added such scandalous gaiety to the history of Cannes. The unspectacular fact of the matter was that this jury met in disgracefully enjoyable amicability, hardly eroded even in the excitement of the final close decision on the Gold Palm. It is true we were locked in.

Now that the Cannes awards are Eurovision's answer to the Oscars, the secrecy of the final decision is sacred. On the morning of the closing day. the members of the jury are swept by car to villa in the hills. The gates are locked and guarded by police and dogs Not until it is time for the ceremony are the gates opened up spin and the jury whisked back with police motor cycle escorts and deposited directly in their seats, still guarded from contact with journalist and spies. Glamour has its backstage. Then arrangements meant struggling into the de rigueur evening dress in the confined facilities of the villa. Eight men and two women dressing in a small bedroom suite.- swapping counsel on bowties and jewellery. gave rather the impression of a cheap dance band and its vocalists on the mad. Who should complain? It is not every day one is thrust into such liar intimacy with two of the most beautiful women in the world, Nastauja Kinski and the exquisite Russian actress from Black Eyes. Elena Sosonova.

I fed myself a veteran of juries, including a bitter Berlin year and one in Manila when, with Satyajit Ray, we were obligated I to stage a demonstration Wrist the Marcos autocracy. This year's Cannes crowd was easily the best in my experience, without one of the endless talkers, movie machiavellis or tiresome temperaments generally endemic to juries. Cannes usually. invites poets and painters and academiciains, but this year they were all film people and at the top of their profession: Claude Berri, producer-director ofJean de Florette, William Goldman, the star Holly.wood writer of Butch Cassidy and All The President's Men, Philippe Sarde, Oscar-winning film composer, George Miller, creator of Mad Max, and so on Goldman, for one, was ecstatic with his experience, a way of talking about movies he could never rind in Hollywood. "The funny thing is that we all think differently about every film, and we are all right." he said. It is worth a small breach of confidentiality to demonstrate the range of approach to arrive at consensus. Nastassja Kinski had spoken passionate ly of the emotional impacts film had made upon her. Goldman replied with a brilliant analysis of its structural defects. Nastassja gazed at him sympathetically. "I like you - really I do - but you think too much." Cannes had a touch of melancholy this year, with the imminent demolition of the old Festival Palace, that has housed the event through most of its 41 years. Not perhaps one of the masterpieces of French architecture, its marble part of the festival, including a staircase, guarded by carved dolphins in rather Forties taste, have however witnessed momentous years of post-war movie history .

Planned in 1939. the first festival did not actually take place until 1946. but even in my first years there in the late Fifties. it still had a feeling of the between wars Cote d'Azure. The old Riviera society - Piccaso, Cocteau, Elsa Maxwell, the Begum Aga Khan -were much in evidence. The old palace held memories of 500 glamorous nights, triumphant debuts, spectacular ovations, the ghosts of Simone Signoret, Gerard Philippe, Visconti, Pasolini, Bunuel, Chaplin, Truffaut. The old place at least went out in triumph. For the last five years, since the main activity of the Festival moved to the brutal but functional new palace, the old building has been handed over to the Directors' Fortnight, a parallel event which came into being after the political upheavals of 1968. This year, it must be admitted, the Directors' Fortnight showed more originality than the competitive part of the festival, including a British masterpiece, Terence Davies's Distant Voices,Still Lives. The final night saw the debut of an Indian woman director, and the last great ovation on the marble staircase Mira Nair's Salaam, Bombay is a co-production between Channel 4 and the Indian Film Development Corporation. It was shot in the streets and brothels of Bombay, with a cast of street kids whom Ms Nair developed in workshops. to win performances of extraordinary vitality and conviction.

The children are caught in the inescapable trap of poverty, scavenging like rats, trying at all costs to evade the worst fate of the inhuman institutions and children's homes. Yet the overwhelming impression of the film is its affirmation of the spirit and defiant flamboyance of these charming and wicked innocents,whom fate has gven nothing except life. Salaam, Bombay not only earned the Palace's last tribute of glory, but also, against formidable competition, the Camera d'Or prize for the best first film of the Festival.

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