A Film About Watching Films for Cannes

Hollywood's favourite subject has always been itself, but now the Cannes film festival has come up with a new twist on cinematic self-obsession - a film about going to the cinema.

Having often endured film after film about making movies, the Cannes festival has commissioned 35 of the world's greatest directors to try to capture how it feels to watch the end product.

Directors as varied as Roman Polanski, the Coen brothers, Lars von Trier and Alejandro González Iñárritu have agreed to make three-minute shorts based on the loose theme of going to the pictures. The pieces will be stitched together into a full-length feature to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the French Riviera festival.

In a novel twist, the auteurs, including several winners of Cannes' Palme d'Or, were not allowed to know what the others were doing.

"None of the directors has learned anything about the other shorts, not even the plots of their colleagues' movies," the veteran festival director Gilles Jacob wrote in Le Monde. He promised a series of unlikely encounters. The German director Wim Wenders had filmed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Canadian David Cronenberg had made his film in a toilet.

Jacob said the modest budget given to each film-maker had forced them to be "inventive".

The results of the experiment will be shown at the festival in May and broadcast on television the same night. The British director Stephen Frears will lead the jury at the festival, which runs from May 16-27.