Denys Arcand is going to Cannes but he won’t have much company on the flight. The celebrated director will be at the French festival next month with his latest, L’âge des ténèbres and was the only Canadian to make the cut when this year’s picks were unveiled Thursday morning.

Ténèbres will close the 60th edition of the festival on May 27, screening out of competition, and was added to the list at the last minute. Cannes will open on May 16 with the Wong Kar Wai film My Blueberry Nights.

Other titles screening in competition include No Country For Old Men from Joel and Ethan Coen, David Fincher’s recent thriller Zodiac, Death Proof by Cannes favorite Quentin Tarantino and Catherine Breillat’s Une Vielle Maîtresse.

Also screening out of competition will be Michael Moore’s health care exposé Sicko, A Mighty Heart from Michael Winterbottom and the forthcoming Ocean’s Thirteen by Steven Soderbergh.

The poor showing by Canada comes despite a long list of high-profile contenders including François Girard’s Silk, the Robert Lantos-produced Fugitive Pieces and Bernard Émond’s Contre toute espérance.

David Cronenberg, Sarah Polley and Atom Egoyan will attend the festival, however. Polley has been named to the fest’s feature film jury, and will preside along with eight other moviemakers, including jury president Stephen Frears, actress Maggie Cheung and French director Michel Piccoli.

Cronenberg, meanwhile, will take part in a music master class with composer Howard Shore (The Last Mimzy, Eastern Promises) and is among the 35 filmmakers presenting shorts as part of the fest’s celebration of its 60th anniversary. The program, dubbed To Each His Own Cinema, will include works by Egoyan, Jane Campion, Walter Salles, Ken Loach and Lars Von Trier.

Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, also thought to be in the running for Cannes, was not submitted. It is still in post-production, according to a source close to the project.

Arcand and domestic distributor Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm have said little about L’âge des ténèbres (‘The Dark Age’), which shot in Montreal last year. AAV originally slated the film for a May release in Quebec, but has now pushed its opening to the week of December 7. The distrib is also looking to play the French-language picture at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Ténèbres follows Arcand’s 2003 Oscar-winner Les invasions barbares, a sequel to his 1986 breakthrough Le déclin de l’empire américain, and centers on a man (Marc Labrèche of Monica la mitraille) trapped in an unhappy marriage and job.