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This year’s Cannes hosts an extraordinary lineup of the world’s greatest auteur directors. Who will carry off the big prizes? Peter Bradshaw gets ready to step into the ring

Spanish actress Penelope Cruz and director Pedro Almodovar pose on the red carpet at Cannes in 2006. Photograph: Jacques Munch/AFP/Getty Images

Variety is calling it a “heavyweight auteur smackdown” and having unveiled his competition list, the festival’s mandarin president, Gilles Jacob, agreed: “The only question I find important is that of the future of auteur, independent cinema.” At Cannes this year, the A-word is back. The festival has unveiled an extraordinary list of auteurs, including Pedro Almodóvar, Ken Loach, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Ang Lee, Chan-wook Park, Ming-liang Tsai, Terry Gilliam and many more. Martin Scorsese will be there, too, as president of the Cannes Classics, introducing a restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.

Perhaps most startlingly, there is the Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, famed for his spare and poetic films. His partner and co-screenwriter, 31-year-old Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, was released from an Iranian prison on Monday, after her term for allegedly spying for the US was reduced on appeal. Saberi, originally arrested for buying a bottle of wine, before the charges snowballed to inadequate press credentials and then spying, was convicted on the flimsiest of grounds. President Obama led the protests, but it could be that the cultural authority bestowed on Ghobadi as a Cannes auteur carried some weight.

This is the year of director’s cinema. These people are not “directors” in the Hollywood sense, not ass-kissing freelance contractors terrified of upsetting the studio heads who are terrified of the opening weekend box office figures. These Cannes competitors are big beasts, heavy-hitters, individual artist-creators in the triumphant sense pioneered by François Truffaut and the 1950s New Wave, for whom the primacy of the artist was essential to cinema’s new self-respect as an art form. All but five of this year’s Cannes entrants have writing credits, but being an auteur is about more than this: authoring a film means bending the entire process to your will and your vision.

Neither is it about Not Being American. Cannes has historically been pro-American. Founded in 1939, then immediately suspended and restarted in 1945, the festival always had support from Hollywood, support that reflected its status as a wartime ally: here was France’s riposte to the Venice film festival, invented by the Axis power Italy. As a backlog of American movies arrived in France, the young Turks of the postwar New Wave greedily devoured them, demanding that Hitchcock and Hawks have full auteur status alongside Jean Renoir. Here was a connoisseurship that established an audacious new cultural mastery over Hollywood, and at the same time proposed a new level playing field for Hollywood and the rest of world cinema. It’s a playing field that continues to exist, if bumpily, in today’s Cannes.

At the festival, there is a traditional demonstration of the director’s primacy. At the beginning of the nightly official premiere, the director leads his or her stars up the red carpet steps, and then sweeps into the auditorium while an amplified announcer rouses the tuxed throng to a standing ovation by saying: “Mesdames and messieurs …” before declaiming the director’s name. No matter how little known compared to his or her often starry cast, it is always just that: the director’s name.

The confrontation between the auteur and the philistines was said to have had its primal scene at Cannes in 1960, when Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura was booed by a grumpy premiere audience. According to legend, they were exasperated at this extremely long and mysterious film, hungry for their dinner and furious at losing restaurant tables they had booked too early. But were they philistines? Or had they imbibed a Cannes auteurisme of their own and become fastidious and highly strung?

The resurgence of director’s cinema is evidence of a hunger for the kind of movie in which the work of a single creative personality is detectable – and in which nuance and evolution within this creative personality is discernible over the span of two or three movies. Perhaps the Cannes Auteurs of 2009 are a reaction to what you might call Hollywood’s Ron Howard factor: famously, Howard is the safest conceivable pair of hands, the artisan who can do a perfectly decent if uninspiring job: a director without a signature, without a flavour. His new movie is the inexpressibly silly Dan Brown Vatican conspiracy thriller Angels and Demons; before that, it was the more ambitious Frost/Nixon. And that’s the point: there is no obvious connection between them; these were just two jobs.

This is not to say that there is no independent US cinema; there are David Lynch, Hal Hartley and John Sayles, whose work lives outside the commercial mainstream. Francis Ford Coppola is at Cannes, with a film that he reportedly chose to present outside the main competition, in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, as a way of staying true to the film’s independent ethos. The digital software revolution has enabled a new generation of film-makers, including “Mumblecore” directors Andrew Bujalski and Joe Swanberg, to make their movies cheaply and thus avoid compromise. In Britain, too, we have our heavyweights, Loach and Mike Leigh, whose pre-eminence on the festival circuit has given them access to European funding. There is a vigorous younger generation, too: Steve McQueen, Joanna Hogg, Duane Hopkins, Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy are producing great work. This year, Andrea Arnold will represent this modest but persistent wave of auteur British cinema in Cannes.

Among the big beasts, the “living ancestors” of Cannes, 86-year-old Alain Resnais is back, with his Les Herbes Folles, or Wild Grass. Resnais is a virtual folk-memory of the festival, but many will remember occasions when Resnais’s auteur status was not, in fact, respected. His great 1955 film about the wartime concentration camps, Night and Fog, was withdrawn from the official competition, ostensibly because of possible offence to the German contingent, but really, it was suspected, because Resnais had fingered the French as collaborators in deportation. An image of a French Army képi hat had been painted out of the print, and the outrage this caused was aesthetic as well as political: the interference to an artwork was an affront to Resnais as a director.

Von Trier, the great prankster, is back this year with his horror film Antichrist. He has form when it comes to splendid auteur-diva behaviour. As a Cannes competitor in 1991, with his film Europa, he was furious when it failed to win the big prize, only smaller awards. After being presented with a beribboned scroll, he ostentatiously threw it away during the ceremony and poutingly described the jury president, Roman Polanski, as a “midget”.

Every morning, after the screening of each new film, there is a press conference at which directors have to face down a pack of often impertinent journalists. Sometimes their performances are very grand. When Michael Haneke – who returns this year – took his notorious ordeal-shocker Funny Games to Cannes in 1997, many couldn’t take it – they walked out. Other critics grimly stuck it out to the very end, determined to be fair and see every frame. At the press conference, Haneke coolly claimed that those who walked out “didn’t need” his lesson on violence – exasperating those who had stayed behind, and were now being told that they were the mindless violence-junkies in need of the director’s corrective punishment.

The other great arena for the Cannes auteur is the Croisette itself. Pedro Almodóvar is back this year with his Broken Embraces, starring Penélope Cruz. I vividly remember sharing a tiny hotel lift with the great man in 2004, virtually nose-to-nose all the way down to the ground floor, and then walking a few steps behind, watching fascinated as he cheerfully strolled up past the Noga Hilton hotel and round on to the seafront boulevard, attracting a huge crowd of people whose hands he genially shook – an exuberant travelling festival that never degenerated into the brawl Paris Hilton might have caused.

Of course, the Cannes auteur’s main prerogative is to provoke and generally wind everyone up. In the past, this has fallen to Haneke, Von Trier and Gaspar Noé, but this year it could be the turn of Quentin Tarantino – whose reputation was cemented by his Palme D’Or win for Pulp Fiction in 1994. Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (the wacky spelling signalling much bull-in-a-china-shop breakage) is about a crew of Jewish-American soldiers in the second world war who venture into Nazi-occupied territory as revenge commandos, intent on nothing more than acts of retributive violence against the Germans.

But for me it is Bahman Ghobadi, who premieres his intriguingly titled Nobody Knows About the Persian Cats, who is the most politically and culturally charged auteur in Cannes this week. Earlier this month, Ghobadi passionately demanded that Iran release his fiancee, and think of her not as a spy but as an Iranian who loves Iran. Ghobadi has no celebrity power in the accepted sense, and, in any case, American-style celebrity would hardly impress the Iranian judiciary. But I do believe his international status as an artist held some sway.

On a more vulgar level, it is exciting to look at this year’s programme and see a single wrestling ring crammed with a couple of dozen giant Sumo warriors. Will Andrea Arnold put the smackdown on Michael Haneke? Will Jane Campion body-slam Ming-liang Tsai? Will Alain Resnais scissor-kick Gaspar Noé into the rear stalls? On the basis of nothing at all, I have a hunch that the referee will finally lift Pedro Almodóvar’s sweaty hand at the end of the bout, and give the Spanish master his first, overdue championship belt. But who knows? Whichever way it goes, this is a festival about real people making real films. I can’t wait.
In the frame: ones to watch

Lars von Trier

Danish prankster and enfant terrible of European cinema since the mid-90s. Returns with his seventh competition film, Antichrist.

Past form: Palme d’Or (Dancer in the Dark); Jury prize (Breaking the Waves, Europa); Technical Grand prize (The Element of Crime).
Current form: Always ahead of the game with his stripped-down Dogme films, seasick Breaking the Waves and the Brecht-esque Dogville. But after failing to provoke with Manderlay and The Boss of It All, perhaps not the force he once was.
Odds: Will have to pull out something special. 6/1.

Quentin Tarantino

Hero of 1990s US independent cinema, at Cannes with a weirdly spelled remake of Enzo G Castellari’s 1978 war movie Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato.

Past form: Palme d’Or (Pulp Fiction).
Current form: Pulp Fiction’s unexpected triumph over Three Colours Red marked a change in the status of American cinema. Tarantino has since tended to dabble, indulging personal enthusiasms for martial arts (Kill Bill) and exploitation movies (Death Proof).
Odds: Everyone hopes the film’s good enough. 4/1.

Jane Campion

Still the only woman to have won the Palme d’Or, Campion is back in Cannes competition for the first time since 1993, with her Keats biopic Bright Star.

Past form: Palme d’Or (The Piano).
Current form: Campion’s career has struggled since the high point of The Piano. She went to Hollywood to make the stiff-backed Portrait of a Lady, and hasn’t made a full-length feature since 2003’s adaptation of Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut, which had decidedly mixed reviews.
Odds: Still needs to rebuild her reputation. 10/1

Ken Loach

Unashamedly political film-maker and a Cannes favourite – Looking for Eric is his ninth appearance in competition.

Past form: Palme d’Or (The Wind That Shakes the Barley); Jury prize (Hidden Agenda, Raining Stones) Fipresci prize (Black Jack, Riff Raff, Land and Freedom); Young Cinema award (Looks and Smiles).
Current form: Loach has survived Thatcherism (when his career was seriously imperilled) and walkouts (some of the British press hated Hidden Agenda) to evolve into a British institution. Not the most stylish director, he is now eight films into a fruitful partnership with writer Paul Laverty.
Odds: Not likely to be incendiary enough. 10/1

Francis Ford Coppola

The one-time Hollywood New Waver is now in his 70s, and opens the Directors’ Fortnight with new feature Tetro.

Past form: Palme d’Or (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now)
Current form: Always erratic, Coppola’s triumphs are mostly behind him; his last film of any real note was 1992’s Dracula. He’s come late to the digital party, but Youth Without Youth and Tetro seem to have given him the independence he craves.
Odds: Not competing for the big prize.

Andrew Pulver