Cannes packed with A-Listers

Last Modified: 15 May 2008
Source: ITN

A-listers packed into the Cannes Film Festival for the opening film: Fernando Meirelles's apocalyptic drama Blindness.

Actress Julianne Moore said her latest film reflects the "tremendous amount of tragedy" in the world.

The film is based on a book by Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramango, telling the story of humanity in the grip of a mysterious blindness epidemic.

Moore plays the wife of a man who is suddenly struck blind while driving home from work, his world turning into a milky haze.

As the contagion spreads the newly blind victims of the so-called White Sickness are rounded up and quarantined in a mental asylum and Moore pretends she is blind in order to remain with her husband, played by Mark Ruffalo.

Moore said of the film: "There is a tremendous amount of tragedy right now...and we are feeling anxious...I think we're reflecting what we're feeling in our own culture."

Director Fernando Meirelles said: "What attracted me was the idea of civilisation collapsing. I started finding so many layers in the film."

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