Oh, say Cannes you see the yachts mooring in the port? It’s that time of year again, when the royalty of the film world begins descending on the French Riviera for the Cannes Film Festival, which opens Wednesday for 12 days of unadulterated cinephilia.

“If you love cinema, this place is heaven,” Quentin Tarantino once raved about the grande dame of film festivals. Leonardo DiCaprio remembers his first time in Cannes as being like in a scene from Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

It’s the festival’s mix of the high-brow and the hedonistic that makes it great, and the 66th edition promises to be no exception.

The party kicks off with Baz Luhrmann’s lavish adaptation of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel about the Roaring Twenties in New York.

DiCaprio plays the mysterious socialite of the title and British actress Carey Mulligan his blue-blooded Daisy in one of the season’s most highly anticipated films, which opened last week in the US to mixed reviews.

Ryan Gosling, Matt Damon, and France’s Marion Cotillard will also grace the red carpet over the next two weeks, as 20 films slug it out for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, which will be awarded by a jury headed by Steven Spielberg.

The line-up mixes heavy-hitters with up-and-coming filmmakers.

Joel and Ethan Coen, who won the Palme d’Or in 1991 for Barton Fink, return with Inside Llewyn Davis, about the 1960s New York folk music scene, starring Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake and John Goodman.

Steven Soderbergh, whose Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) won him top honours at the tender age of 26, is also back with the film he swears will be his last — Behind the Candelabra, a Liberace biopic.

Michael Douglas plays the flamboyant gay pianist, who died of AIDS in 1987, and Matt Damon his young lover, Scott Thorson, on whose autobiographical novel the film is based.

Gay relationships are a theme in the competition, with Franco-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche also plunging into the fray with Blue Is The Warmest Colour, a lesbian teen romance.

The film, which comes in the midst of angry protests in France over a gay marriage bill, is expected to be one of the most risqualong with Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur.

Eleven years after winning the Palme d’Or for The Pianist, the Franco-Polish filmmaker has cast his wife Emmanuelle Seigner as an actress bent on subjugating a director in a black comedy about sex and domination.

European and American directors dominate the field this year, with Asia, Africa and Latin America taking only five spots in the main competition.

Japan’s two entries are a study in contrasts. Takashi Miike’s crime thriller, Shield of Straw, has a police squad protecting a murderer with a price on his head while Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Like Father, Like Son is a quiet reflection on family.

Families and their secrets are also a leitmotif in the latest offering from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi.

Farhadi returns to the themes of his 2012 Oscar winner A Separation in The Past, about an Iranian man in the throes of a divorce from his French wife, played by Berenice Bejo, star of The Artist.

Among the other contenders are Nebraska, a road movie from Alexander Payne, maker of The Descendants, and The Great Beauty from Italy’s Paolo Sorrentino about an ageing writer recalling his youth in Rome.

Female directors are thin on the ground, with only one — Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, sister of former French first lady and singer Carla Bruni — making the cut, which is still one more than 2012.

The gender balance is healthier in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, which opens with Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring about a group of teens who rob celebrities’ homes.

Speculation is already swirling about which film packs the kind of shock value for which the festival has become famous.

All eyes are on Canadian pin-up Ryan Gosling, who has teamed up again with Nicolas Winding Refn, maker of Drive, for another film noir, in which he plays a drug smuggler negotiating the Thai underworld.

The trailer hints at more of the gruesome violence that Drive spewed.

The festival runs from May 15 to 26. The Marche du Film, the world’s biggest film market, runs parallel to the festival, from May 15 to 24.

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