What might also serve the festival is to have juried awards for films by foreign directors, since the world cinema section has often spotlighted intensely idiosyncratic movies.
The buddy thriller, with its one plot, has long been a stabilser-wheels genre for cheap, presumed malleable, foreign directors such as 2 Guns' Baltasar Kormakur, from Iceland, who also made Wahlberg's negligible Contraband, or Chilean-Swede Daniel Espinosa, who made Denzel's buddy-ish Safe House.
Though he continued to stage operas himself, he was also noted for bringing in world-class foreign directors — the first from outside the family — among them the theater director Patrice Chéreau and the conductor Daniel Barenboim, who is Jewish.
Foreign directors, such as Bernardo Bertolucci and Milos Forman, have won before, but never for a film not in English.
Likewise, French companies stalled on appointing foreign directors last year.
Chinese producers wanted a foreign director for the project.
The awards, which are backed by Japan's oldest film magazine, Kinema Junpo, saw the best foreign film gong handed to the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men, while best foreign director was awarded jointly to Sidney Lumet for Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and Sean Penn for Into the Wild.
They're far too chauvinistic to nominate a foreign director.
It will probably be made by a younger director -- maybe even a foreign director".
As one foreign director of a private Russian bank puts it, the others "just have to work a bit harder for deposits".
