The Marilyn Monroe banner is nearly up, the crowd control barriers have a new lick of paint, and the keenest paparazzi have chained their stepladders to lampposts along La Croisette for the best view of the red carpet.
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Welcome to Cannes, the world's most celebrated film festival.
And if the impending media crush is anything to go by, everyone, it seems, wants to be here.
And the place to be if you're a filmmaker is in the official competition, where 22 films compete this year for the coveted Palme d'Or.
There may be a distinct absence of Australian films in the official competition and only one Australian feature film in the entire program, however, there's going to be no shortage of Australian talent on display over the next 12 days.
The official entrant is Wayne Blair's The Sapphires, the story of four singers discovered on an Aboriginal mission who were heralded as Australia's answer to The Supremes.
The film has been included in the festival as a special gala event and has its world premiere at midnight on Saturday, following in the footsteps of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge and Stephan Elliot's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert which kicked off their international success with party night screenings at Cannes.
Walking up the famous red steps that lead to the 2300-seat Grand Lumiere Theatre will be the stars from the film, including Jessica Mauboy, Deborah Mailman and Chris O'Dowd.
But Aussies don't only make Australian films.
Two of the American movies in competition have been directed by Australian expatriates. Andrew Dominik - best known for Chopper - will be here with Killing Them Softly, a crime drama starring Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini and Australians Bella Heathcote and Ben Mendelsohn, while John Hillicoat (who made The Proposition) directs Lawless, a prohibition-era gangster film written by Nick Cave and starring Canberra actress Mia Wasikowska alongside Guy Pearce.
And then there's Nicole Kidman. She'll be strutting the red carpet twice, firstly when the 1960s thriller The Paperboy screens, and a second time with Phillip Kaufman's Hemingway & Gellhorn, one of the great romances of the last century.
And who would have thought Kylie Minogue would end up in a French film called Holy Motors, about a man with multiple personalities? That's Cannes.