The Cannes Film Festival has the chaotic magic of an old-fashioned steeple-chase. The favourites always fall at the first hedge and the race seems to go on forever. The competition for the biggest cinema prize this side of the Oscars is now 61 years old, and for independent auteurs the trophy is huge. The Palme d’Or has the power to finance those £5 million thinking projects that are increasingly hard to fund.

There are 22 films in official competition this year, and roughly 35,000 story-hungry journalists with a desperate need to tell Clint about where he got it wrong. I don’t know why the Palme d’Or exerts this cruel grip. The 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival last year was a stunning demonstration of celebrity pulling power but a ghastly disappointment on screen. The tabloid froth and pop looked brilliant on the red carpet but the films withered on screen.

Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux – the Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev of the Cannes monopoly – have dramatically revised their faith in tinsel. The two oligarchs have wisely reinserted a cerebral spine into the festival. They have recalled tried-and-tested favourites: auteurs such as the German maestro Wim Wenders, the perennial Cannes champions Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and a sprinkling of lofty American mavericks including Steven Soderbergh, James Gray and Clint Eastwood.

There is a touch more vinegar about the menu. Jia Zhangke’s film, 24 City, about the startling pace of change in high-rise apartment blocks in Chengdu, China, has a mournful urgency after the catastrophic earthquake on Monday. Eastwood’s Changeling, about the disappearance of a nine-year-old child, starring Angelina Jolie as the distraught mother, chimes with the darkest newspaper story of the last 12 months. And the four hours and 28 minutes of Soderbergh’s bio-epic Guerrilla, starring Benicio Del Toro as the iconic revolutionary Che Guevara, is an endurance test destined to thrill and horrify critics.

This is far more than a simple return to core values. There is some serious stocktaking going on. The recession has wrapped cold fingers around Hollywood budgets. The city gamblers, who were once a ubiquitous nuisance on the wildly overpriced rented boats in the marina at Cannes, are evaporating by the second. Venerable and vintage old salts, such as Derek Malcolm, think the recession might nudge independent cinema into a new ice age.

The fears are very real. Wall Street money is vanishing, and the buyers of thinking films are infinitely more choosey. The credit crunch poses intriguing questions. There is still a significant amount of “slush” money on the production side of the industry, but hardheaded distributors think that this will disappear in a matter of months.

How this will affect Cannes is a fascinating riddle. It could be profound. The market has grown by 40 per cent since 2003, and by 8 per cent since last year. But if agents, distributors and buyers feel that they can’t take any more exotic gambles, Cannes will lose out.

The festival’s unmatched ability to attract unlikely art-house heroes demands the utmost respect. Indiana Jones is a mere trifle. Mike Tyson is arriving to explain how he has managed to persuade James Toback to make a documentary bearing his name for the Un Certain Regard section. Madonna is on Amfar duty in Cannes, and the writer of Nathan Rissman’s documentary about children orphaned by Aids in I Am Because We Are.

The cherry, however, is the eagerly anticipated arrival of Diego Maradona. The film-maker Emir Kusturica has made a documentary about the footballer’s life (entitled humbly enough, Maradona by Kusturica). A well-placed insider was philosophical about Maradona’s itinerary in Cannes. He drew long and deep on his cigarette, fixed me a weary eye and suggested I visit a bookmaker to divine the odds.

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