indieWIRE has posted the lineup for this year’s panels at the American Pavilion in Cannes. The events include a Conversation with Francis Ford Coppola moderated by journalist Scott Foundas; a panel presenting a cross-section of American indie talent including Lee Daniels, Josh and Benny Safdie and Lynn Shelton; and sessions on the recession, documentaries as journalism, and new platforms of distribution.

And I’ll be involved in two panels: on Sunday evening, I’m moderating a session called Fan Nation, featuring Anvil! director Sacha Gervasi, Tim League from the Alamo Drafthouse/Fantastic Fest and other esteemed guests; the next night, I’ll be speaking to the evolution of film journalism ona panel called “It’s a mad, new media world.” Full details on all of these sessions can be found at the link above.

It takes a special brand of moxie (or delusion or intoxication) to play metal seriously. For the Toronto, Canada based Anvil, who are the subject of The Terminal screenwriter and former #1 Anvil fan Sasha Gervasi’s documentary, the outrageous dream of everlasting youth that fuels even the most pedestrian of aging rock bands to continue on is still in full force as its members grapple with life in their fifties.

The film, which opens on Friday after a stellar, year long trip around the American festival circuit, chronicles the band’s origins, their decade of relative success and their fall into obscurity. For its members, Steve “Lips” Kudlow (lead vocals, lead guitar), Robb Reiner (the drummer, not the director of This Is Spinal Tap), Dave Allison (vocals, rhythm guitar) and Ian Dickson (bass), Metal is not something to be outgrown, to be cast aside as an embarrassing folly of youth. While it may seem that being a faded eighties hair metal band star is one of the more unfortunate paths that could befall a professional musician, for the members of Anvil, who began a new tour last night that is largely due to the publicity the film has generated, perhaps a third act can still exist. I doubt we can say the same for the following bands.

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Documentaries about musicians gravitate towards dysfunction, because that’s how you get drama into documentaries and most musicians — especially in bands, where too much time spent together yields unnatural tensions — seem to be pretty dramatic anyway. So it’s curious that both Anvil!: The Story Of Anvil and Iron Maiden: Flight 666 played at SXSW, because they’re about as diametrically opposed as movies about metal bands that’ve lasted over 30 years could be. They’re both love letters, but one has to convince the audience to care; the other is pre-sold.

As for which is better, that’d be Anvil. This is made out of love as much as any sense of “what a story”; the last shot (a post-credits photo of director Sacha Gervasi as 1985’s best-coiffed teen metalhead with his then-favorite band) confirms that it’s a gift from a former teen fan, when music matters most. In the early ’80s Anvil was on track to join Metallica and Anthrax in the upper echelons of commercial success; their hit “Metal on Metal” led to them playing alongside Bon Jovi in 1984 in Japan. But something stopped them, and though Slash, Lemmy, Scott Ian and Lars Ulrich all turn up at the start to testify to Anvil’s lasting importance to metal, none of them have any clue what happened to them or why.

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