Singer Jones Takes Lead in Cannes Opener

The screen debut of the singer Norah Jones and the story of a paralysed man who could only communicate with his left eye are among the movies competing for prizes at the 60th Cannes film festival, which opens today.

Jones - who found fame with her song Come Away With Me - takes the lead in My Blueberry Nights, which opens the event tonight. She plays a part-time waitress who embarks on a journey across the US after having her heart broken.

The film, which also stars Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz, is the first English language feature by the director Wong Kar Wai, who won the Cannes best director award for Happy Together in 1997.

His subsequent films In the Mood for Love and 2046 were also nominated for prizes.

Other directors competing for the prestigious Palme d'Or include Julian Schnabel, whose The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is based on the memoir of the paralysed French magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who could only move his left eyelid.

Quentin Tarantino will be competing with Death Proof, his section of the double feature Grindhouse, made in collaboration with Robert Rodriguez. Tarantino won the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction in 1994.

Gus van Sant, who won the 2003 award for his Columbine massacre-themed drama Elephant, returns with Paranoid Park, which tells the story of a teenage skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard and keeps it quiet.

Out of the competition, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie lead the Hollywood red-carpet line up. Clooney and Pitt star alongside Matt Damon and Al Pacino in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen.

Jolie stars in the drama A Mighty Heart, about the real-life abduction and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Pitt, her boyfriend, produced the film, which was directed by the British film-maker Michael Winterbottom.

There are no British films in the competition this year, but Stephen Frears, who directed The Queen, is the president of the festival jury.