Ang Lee's new film, Taking Woodstock, is high on the media's shortlist for the top gong at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

The jury panel will announce the final lineup for Cannes' main competitions--including such major honors as Best Picture and Best Director--on Wednesday, French local time. Ang Lee has not yet confirmed any nomination for his film, a second homosexual-themed picture following his Oscar-winning success, Brokeback Mountain in 2005.

Lee's Woodstock film is based on the book, Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life--a memoir by Elliot Tiber, the man who enabled the Woodstock music festival to take place in 1969. The three-day Woodstock event not only changed Tiber's life, but became a turning point in American culture.

The Lust, Caution director is also in talks to direct the film adaptation of Life of Pi, a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel, telling the story of an Indian boy, Pi, who survived almost 300 days on a boat with a Bengal tiger in the Pacific ocean after a shipwreck.

Cannes Film Festival regular Quentin Tarantino's World War II picture Inglorious Bastard, starring Brad Pitt, will debut at the festival which opens on May 13. The flick is also a hot competitor for the prestigious Cannes honor.

Another highly anticipated film, Tetro, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, will not take part in the Cannes race. Having been invited to the festival, the Godfather director withdrew from the competition claiming it goes against the nature of an independent film, to run for a prize.

Chinese director Lu Chuan's Nanjing massacre epic, City of Life and Death, which rolls out at cinemas in China on April 22, will share a slot in Cannes along with three other Asian films from China and South Korea. Presumably the Asian force will be tightly followed by Asian media during the festival.

Opening this year's festival is Pixar's animated picture, Up. It will mark the first time in Cannes history an animated picture has opened the festivities.

(CRIENGLISH.com April 22, 2009)