SERGEI LOZNITSA

France Cannes 2022 Opening Ceremony President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy appears via remote during the opening ceremony of the 75th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Tuesday, May 17, 2022. Cannes was initially conceived as a counter to the Venice Film Festival, which had then fallen under the influence of Mussolini and Hitler. This year's festival has unspooled against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, and sometimes in spite of it. The culture of any nation, of any people, belongs to the entire world.”To explain the feeling of being in Cannes, Loznitsa cited the W.H. ___Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP___For more Cannes Film Festival coverage, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/cannes-film-festivalCopyright 2022 The Associated Press.

The war in Ukraine took a starring role on the opening night of the 75th Cannes Film Festival and it has rarely been far out of frame since.

After a canceled 2020 edition and a scaled back gathering last year, the Cannes Film Festival kicked off Tuesday which what organizers hope will be a fully resuscitated French Riviera spectacular.

After the 2020 Cannes Film Festival was canceled by the pandemic and the 2021 edition was scaled back — even kisses were forbade on the red carpet — the lavish French Riviera cinema soiree is set to return with a festival that promises to be something like normal.

With tensions around the war in Ukraine as a backdrop, the Cannes Film Festival plans to host some 35,000 people as the movie industry looks to reclaim its pre-pandemic glamour.

Sergei Loznitsa, the director of Donbass, charges headlong at Ukrainian history’s sensitive topics.