Grim Brazilian drama opens Cannes 

A grim Brazilian drama about society's descent into anarchy has opened Cannes film festival and politics dominated the opening news conference held by jury president Sean Penn.

Blindness, starring Julianne Moore, was a sombre start to 12 days of movies, publicity stunts and late-night revelry in the Riviera town, which prides itself on welcoming tough cinema as well as rolling out the red carpet for Hollywood royalty.

Directed by Brazil's Fernando Meirelles, of City of God renown, English-language Blindness is an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning writer Jose Saramago's novel of the same name, and tells the story of a plague of blindness sweeping the world.

Moore plays a doctor's wife, who, like the film's audience, sees death, cruelty, degradation as well as dignity around her.

"We consider ourselves so strong and sophisticated and solid, and then one thing goes and everything collapses," Meirelles told reporters after a press screening. "We are skating on thin ice. Anything can happen and everything does."

The movie officially premieres in the evening.

Penn, who heads the nine-member jury that decides which of 22 entries in the main competition receives the coveted Palme d'Or for best film, hinted that the winner was likely to be one that tackled contemporary issues.

"Whatever we select for the Palme d'Or, I think that we all are in sync that we're going to feel very confident that the ... maker of that film was very aware of the times in which he lives," the US actor said.

Penn, a vocal opponent of George Bush, renewed his criticism of the US president.

"When somebody operates without a brain and without a heart they kill hundreds of thousands of people around the world," he told a news briefing during which he lit a cigarette in defiance of French anti-smoking laws.

"Odd" choice for opening

Meirelles said it was both a pressure and an honour to open Cannes, but added: "To be honest, I still don't think this is the best film to open a festival."

Moore called the choice "kind of odd".

Much of the film is set in an abandoned asylum outside an unnamed city, where those stricken by the contagious "White Sickness" - so called because the blind see white, not black - are locked up by increasingly panicked authorities.

A workable system of living despite the squalor soon breaks down when one prisoner, played by Mexico's Gael Garcia Bernal, takes the law into his own hands.

Atrocities are committed, and when the prisoners break free, Moore finds the whole city has fared little better.

Joining Meirelles in the main competition is another Brazilian entry Line of Passage, by Walter Salles, and two Argentine productions - Pablo Trapero's prison drama Leonera and thriller The Headless Woman by Lucrecia Martel.

They are up against Clint Eastwood's Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, and Steven Soderbergh's Che, a two-part, four-and-a-half hour epic on Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, with Benicio del Toro in the title role.

The other two US entries are James Gray's Two Lovers, featuring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix, and Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The biggest show in town this year is likely to be the latest installment of the Indiana Jones series, again starring Harrison Ford as the whip-wielding archaeologist in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull by Steven Spielberg.