Cannes diary

Roman Polanski, the Polish auteur who some still blame for launching Hugh Grant's career, returned to the Croisette yesterday after more than six years.

The France-based director was back in competition with his wartime epic, The Pianist, based on the memoirs of the concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, who survived Nazi occupation and the Warsaw ghetto. Polanski, 69, looked worn as he picked over his own miserable wartime childhood for journalists who wanted to know how much of the mental anguish in the film had sprung from his own "personal agony".

Polanski grew up in the ghetto and dodged the concentration camps that claimed his mother by fleeing through the Polish countryside, sheltered by generous Catholics.

After a week of traipsing across red carpets and smiling at a thousand flashguns, Cannes directors will do anything for a bit of peace. But the Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay went further than most. One stifling afternoon, during the buzz surrounding her second feature, Morvern Caller - which was applauded in the director's fortnight - she and her "non-industry" boyfriend hailed an old yacht and sailed 12 miles into international waters for a spontaneous wedding presided over by the captain.

"I just wanted to get away from Cannes," she told Variety. "It was really peaceful."

But not that peaceful. Loud scenes from a porn film were in mid-take on a nearby island in full view of the boat.

"It was like a Fellini film," said Ramsay who wore a red and white 1950s dress.

First Titanic, now Zeppelin - the story of young love on the doomed Hindenburg airship. Illustrating Hollywood's readiness to reap pin-ups and box office takings from historical catastrophe, a US/German/Italian co-production is to make a Titanic style $50m "event movie" out of the final doomed flight of the largest airship ever built.

The mystery of why the Hindenburg burst into flames above Lakehurst naval air station in May 1936 has never been fully resolved. Producers say a romantic sub-plot involving a gooey-eyed German boy and an American girl will touch on the social-political turmoil in Nazi Germany. But who will sing the theme tune?

The first indicator of tomorrow's Palme D'Or prize for best film comes in the shape of a dog biscuit. The unofficial Palme Dog award for best canine performance was handed out last night on the lawn of the Grand Hotel. The honour, a form of celluloid Crufts now in its second year, went to Tahti, the pink-nosed mongrel who played Hannibal the dog in the Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki's film, The Man Without a Past. A jury of critics and film hacks decided the dog had "bags of character." Tahti, who comes from a long line of dog performers, had two pages to himself in the programme - a rare event.