Bader TV News on the Red Carpet at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival

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Bader TV News on the Red Carpet at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival

With around 35,000 film professionals and over 4,000 international journalists coming together for the world’s biggest film event, the energy level just went higher.

Kristen Stewart, who stars in French director Olivier Assayas’s independent film, “Personal Shopper”, at the Cannes Film Festival, says she is more at home with France’s cinematic culture than Hollywood’s as the focus is less on making money.

The Twilight star said that she likes the risk involved in making films with “a culture that’s felt”.

“What is really obvious and apparent is the difference between why people make movies in France and why people make movies in the States,” she said.

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Stewart is no newcomer to independent cinema. She starred in independent movies before, in-between and after the Twilight series, between 2008 and 2012, including Jake Scott’s “Welcome to the Rileys” and Walter Salles’s “On The Road”.

“‘Twilight’ may have sort of distracted people from what I had been doing for a long time – but even within that series there were five Twilight films and in between each one of them I did an independent movie,” she said.

The 26-year-old said that she is looking forward to working with Assayas again.

“I feel like there is no way in hell that we’re not going to explore another subject together I just don’t know when that’s going to be,” she said.

“This was lucky that it was in such a condensed period – he has other things to do and other stories to tell and I’ll go do the same for a bit but hopefully we find each other again.”

Stewart also co-stars with Jesse Eisenberg in Woody Allen’s out-of-competition film, “Cafe Society” at Cannes.

Big news at the Cannes Film Festival is that Paul Verhoeven has important film The controversial Dutch filmmaker has been stuck in an endless cycle of development since 2006’s acclaimed “Black Book,” with only the not-much-loved chain camera film “Tricked,” released in the US last year, to show for it. Now his “Elle,” which sounds like a French “Death Wish” only with Isabelle Huppert, Neil Jordan’s misjudged “The Brave One,” starring Jodie Foster), made its French Riviera debut.

Of course, “Elle” is far from the hottest ticket. Though its most populist titles are naturally out of competition — Steven Spielberg’s “The BFG,” Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys,” Jodie Foster’s star-studded “Money Monster” and opening night film “Cafe Society,” this year’s requisite Woody Allen entry — Cannes 2016 boasts the top players and ones mostly only known to those who closely watch the industry.

Jim Jarmusch has “Paterson,” pairing Adam Driver with Iranian star/activist Golshifteh Farahani. “Drive”’s Nicolas Winding Refn looks to atone for the much-despised “Only God Forgives” with the Elle Fanning-starring horror-thriller “The Neon Devil,” whose title sounds like a Refn parody. There are newbies from director Sean Penn (“The Last Face”), Ken Loach (“I, Daniel Blake”) and Jeff Nichols’ “Loving,” which finds the maker of “Take Shelter” and “Midnight Special” shifting to a civil rights docudrama.

Among the Euro-gods are Pedro Almodovar’s “Julieta,” a return to melodramas that will arrives soon after the Spanish legend’s involvement in the Panama Papers kerfuffle. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, maybe the most reliably same-y filmmakers now working, will come bearing “La Fille Inconnue,” which is almost certainly terrific.

Olivier Assayas returns to a fest that crowned his “Clouds of Sils Maria” co-star Kristen Stewart with an acting award. It’s even another KStew product, “Personal Shopper,” which should allow journos yet another chance to be besieged on Twitter by the actress’ rabid fanbase of randos with “Twilight” avatars. (Stewart also stars in the new Woody Allen.) Speaking of “Clouds,” Juliette Binoche reunites with her “Camille Claudel 1915” director Bruno Dumont for the oft-punishing filmmaker’s “Slack Bay.”

Arguably even bigger than a new Verhoeven, to be honest, is the presence of a new Maren Ade, the German director whose last film, the astute relationship saga “Everyone Else,” was a stunner all the way back in 2009. According to the IMDb, her new “Toni Erdmann” follows a father trying to reconnect with his daughter, and the cast includes reliable Romanian intenso Vlad Ivanov, who has been probably most seen as a gun-toting heavy in “Snowpiercer.” Ivanov’s fellow countryman Crisi Puiu (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”) also pops up with the doubtlessly austere and funny “Sieranevada.”

South Korea’s Park Chan-wook (“Oldboy,” etc.) is one of the few non-Westerners present, toting his lesbian drama “The Handmaiden.” Filling out the name directors is “American Honey,” from “Wuthering Heights”’ Andrea Arnold, and “It’s Only the End of the World,” in which Marion Cotillard, Lea Seydoux and Vincent Cassel surrender themselves to Xavier Dolan, who is, again, not even close to being 30 years old. Speaking of names, most of the out-of-comp “Un Certain Regard” section is made of budding talents who are complete strangers, even to fest-regulars. That’s possibly even more exciting than a new Assayas.