Behind the scenes at the Cannes Film Festival

Behind the scenes at the Cannes Film Festival, which starts its 12-day run on Wednesday: SOUNDS FAMILIAR: Abel Ferrara’s racy "Welcome to New York" in which Gerard Depardieu plays a character much like the disgraced former head of the IMF is to get its first outing at Cannes. Three years ago, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the talk of the festival as lurid details of the New York sex scandal that destroyed his career and French presidential ambitions unfolded during that year's movie extravaganza. "Welcome to New York" starts with a disclaimer stating that although "inspired by a court case" it is "entirely fictional". Movie industry newspaper The Hollywood Reporter, however, points out that "anyone with a brain and an Internet connection will know what it’s about". In one scene Depardieu’s character Devereaux is seen "grunting and wailing like a rhinoceros having a triple orgasm", according to the Reporter’s reviewer. Variety, meanwhile, calls it "graphically rendered" and a "fraught study of addiction, narcissism and the lava flow of capitalist privilege" with Devereaux shown "behaving very badly all up and down the Eastern seaboard". Also starring Jacqueline Bisset, the film will be seen by industry movers and shakers on Saturday as part of the Cannes Film Market, the festival's commercial arm. SPANDAU BALLET THE MOVIE: They've long ditched the mascara and frilly blouses but 1980s "New Romantic" band Spandau Ballet were so fascinating to director George Hencken he made a film about them. The band -- which along with Duran Duran reshaped the post-punk British music scene in their pixie boots and puff sleeves -- gets the full in-depth biographical treatment in Hencken's documentary "Soul Boys of the Western World". Lead singer Tony Hadley plus three of the four other band members -- Martin Kemp, John Keble and Steve Norman -- will all be in Cannes to promote the film charting their working class London roots and rise to fame that saw them sell more than 25 million records. All friends again after spending time in court suing each other in the 1990s, the film's publicity material coyly talks about showing what it's "really like to be a global pop superstar and what that can do to life-long friendships". CUE TESTOSTERONE: No sedate press conferences or cosy Croisette terrace interviews planned when action man Sylvester Stallone’s crew of ageing, testosterone-fuelled mercenaries marches into town on Sunday. Instead Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Statham, Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, Wesley Snipes and Antonio Banderas -- here to promote "The Expendables 3", the latest in Stallone's hit franchise -- will roar down the Cannes seafront in an armoured vehicle