Got up on the early-brights and took in Volgograd with D-Coc. The film was Czech. Its morality, however, I found to be surprisingly Buddhist; D-Coc disagrees. The flick was about a Polish immigrant's struggle against the insensitive bureaucracy in modern-day Eastern Europe, with flashbacks to the Soviet rule during the Cold War. I wish I lived during the Cold War. Everything was so nicely photographed.

They're telling us the prevailing theme for this year's festival, by accident or by design, is films about how cultures overlap and intersect - of which I've seen at least two, Persepolis and Ballon Rouge, though I guess cases could be made for some of the others as well (Pink, particularly). Once you've been told this is the throughline it's damn near impossible to not notice it, like the Marla Singer on the roof your mouth that would heal if you could just stop tonguing it. Still, it never hurts to have breadcrumbs.

I just got out of Chacun son cinema, the omnibus collection of short films by filmmakers from all over the world made to celebrate Cannes' 60th anniversary. Not unlike another programme of shorts with which I am intimately familiar, some were terrific, some were awful. David Lynch snuck a real piece of shit "finished just in time for TIFF" into the front of the show, and if the next three films had been as bad as that one I would have left straight away. Fortunately, they weren't. Takeshi Kitano, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Zhang Yimou's films were all predictably awesome, and the Coen Bros.' sure as hell didn't suck. The Bresson and Fellini references began to make my head spin after a while, but there was one film (can't remember who made it) that fairly gloriously expressed the furious dichotomy of loving 8 1/2: the melancholic old woman who knows things will never be like this again, and the oblivious young couple fucking in the back of the theatre. Because that's the movie: you're either too young, hornied up and stupid to know what the fuck you're seeing, or too old to be as young, hornied up and stupid as the lusty cinematic ecstasy makes you want to be. 8 1/2 has no middles. There were about seven awful films in a row in the second half of the show that really tried my patience, including Atom Egoyan's bulljive that might as well have been subtitled "Hello, I'm Atom Egoyan. I'm a Great Canadian Filmmaker. I enjoy masturbating in a cup and then drinking it." Fortunately, Lars Von Trier showed up to knock things back into shape (with a hammer). Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu actually managed to find the nicest pair of eyes on the planet, and photograph them. And there was some brilliant concluding work from Walter Salles. Yup, all in all a thrilling, maddening bunch of films.

Now I'm off to play a little game I like to call, "where's Matthew Price?"