The revolt of forty years ago began on the beach, with a view of the Mediterranean and of many wine glasses. The would-be revolutionaries spent six days and nights meeting and drinking in luxury hotels and on expensive yachts, proclaiming their solidarity with the working classes.

The protests were so boisterous that one of its leaders dived into a flowerbed while battling over a microphone. But there was more than just political debate. Charlie Chaplin's daughter, Geraldine Chaplin, prevented a film from being screened by simply holding the curtain shut.

On the seventh day, the protestors finally won, and a hand-painted sign was displayed at the Cinema Palace in Cannes: "Le Festival est clos" -- the festival is closed. The step was taken "to avert acts of violence," the unnerved festival management announced on May 19, 1968.

Forty years later, the cancellation of the film festival is seen as a decisive moment in the history of Cannes, as one of those rare moments when the cinema truly reflected the Zeitgeist. And although the veterans of the 1968 protests have died (like Louis Malle and François Truffaut) or merely continue to putter away in private (like Jean-Luc Goddard), they are being celebrated with great pomp and circumstance on the 40th anniversary of those events of 1968. For example this year's festival is screening a documentary film in honor of Roman Polanski, entitled "Wanted and Desired."

Other directors, like Claude Lelouch and Carlos Saura, are presenting films in Cannes that were overshadowed by that revolutionary theater 40 years ago.

The 61st Cannes International Film Festival, which opens on Wednesday with Fernando Meirelles' apocalyptic thriller "Blindness," is awash in nostalgia for the late 1960s.

A four-hour homage to Ernesta "Che" Guevara de la Serna, the polyglot revolutionary and Cuban minister of industry, whose portrait still adorns countless T-shirts, posters and book covers today, is widely expected to be one of the high points at Cannes this year. Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh ("Ocean's Eleven") was apparently so impressed by his idol that he decided to shoot two films about Guevara, "Guerilla" and "The Argentine," which are being shown as a double feature in Cannes.

There has been much speculation over which side of Che Soderbergh will portray in his two films: the leftist political pop star, who marched into the United Nations General Assembly in uniform and with a cigar in his mouth, or the totalitarian dreamer and fanatical "Comandante," who had countless political rivals eliminated before he himself was shot in the Bolivian jungle in 1967.

The cast and trailers suggest that Soderbergh opted for Che's more mythical side. Guevara, wearing his chic military cap and frequently gazing into space, is played by the sometimes slightly heavy-handed actor and Oscar winner Benicio Del Toro, star of Soderbergh's "Traffic."

Tamara Bunke, Che's loyal comrade and presumed lover, who was educated in the ways of socialism in East Germany, is played by Germany's eternal Hollywood hopeful, 33-year-old Franka Potente. It is a thankless role for the actress in several respects. After her brief Hollywood appearance in "The Bourne Conspiracy" (2004), Potente made it clear that she felt that her character was killed off too early in the movie. The two new films about Che Guevara could prove to be the source of similar dissatisfaction, after all Tamara Bunke died at the young age of 29.

Rolling Out the Red Carpet for the Aging Auteurs

Nevertheless, Soderbergh's revolutionary epics stand a good chance of coming away with prizes at the festival, because Guevara is apparently pretty popular at Cannes. In 2004, Walter Salles' film "The Motorcycle Diaries" won not one but three awards. Soderbergh's films are also being tipped to do well because Hollywood hothead Sean Penn, who likes to portray himself as an eternal revolutionary, is heading this year's festival jury.

But Che Guevara isn't the only controversial politician to be portrayed in Cannes this year. The Italian festival entry "Il Divo" ("The Divine One") portrays the dubious machinations of Giulio Andreotti, one of Rome's most powerful men over the past 50 years. Andreotti, now 89 and a senator for life, has been prime minister of Italy seven times, despite -- or perhaps because -- his having been repeatedly linked to organized crime.

Cannes is also rolling out the red carpet for many of the great, and now older, men of the world cinema. The aging stars expected on the Croisette this year include Woody Allen, 72, Clint Eastwood, 77, Dennis Hopper, 72 and Harrison Ford, 65.

For the fourth time, Ford is risking life and limb as a well-preserved archeology professor in Steven Spielberg's adventure spectacle "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." And Dustin Hoffman, 70, who rose to stardom in the 1968 counterculture satire "The Graduate," will be in Cannes to promote the animated comedy "Kung Fu Panda." In the film, Hoffman lends his voice to a kung fu-fighting panda named Shifu. Not every film has to be historic.

Clint Eastwood, who began his movie career as a stoic gunslinger in countless spaghetti Westerns and was revered by many denizens of the 60s as an anti-establishment rebel, has since made a name for himself as a talented director. In his new film "Changeling," Angelina Jolie plays a young Los Angeles woman whose son is kidnapped in 1928. Eastwood turns her story into an epic drama about a mother's desperate struggle against a corrupt system.

This year's festival is serving up a plethora of spry retirees. In his new film "Wolke 9" ("Cloud 9"), German director Andreas Dresen ("Sommer vorm Balkon," or "Summer in Berlin") reveals the wilder side of senior citizens. After a harmonious marriage of 30 years, a woman in her mid-60s, played by Ursula Werner, embarks on a tumultuous affair with a 76-year-old man.

In his film, Dresen tells the story of a spring awakening in the autumn of two people's lives, of pulsating passion and of great emotions that defy old age. In Cannes, of all places, normally a playground for those obsessed with youth, Dresen insists that sometimes truly fulfilling sex can only be found past the age of 60.

While "Cloud 9" is being screened as part of the Official Selection "Un Certain Regard" section (the president of that jury is Turkish-German director Fatih Akin), Cannes veteran Wim Wenders, 62, has made it into the main competition for the ninth time since 1976 with his film "Palermo Shooting." The origins of Wenders' new work happen to date back to 1968.

"That was when I arrived in Palermo for the first time," he says. "It was a fascinating city of ghosts, filled with ruins. I felt transported back to the years following World War II." Since that first visit to Palermo, Wenders has always wanted to capture the city's morbid atmosphere, what he calls its "unique relationship with death," in images.

In "Palermo Shooting," Wenders tells the story of a Düsseldorf photographer (portrayed by Campino, the lead singer of the German rock band Die Toten Hosen) who travels to Sicily, is pursued by a mysterious gunman, meets the love of his life (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and, in the end, faces death head-on.