On my way to work this morning, I missed the train, so I decided to grab a copy of the "BT" news paper to kill the time waiting for the next. Not a bad choice! There was a small article about LOTR and the Cannes Film Festival.

I didn't have time to scan it (and you wouldn't be able to understand it anyway :), so I've translated it here:

Lord of the Rings at the Cannes Film Festival

The yearly film festival in Cannes is always quite a circus. But this year it gets an extra edge. - Or 3, and a medieval touch into the bargain.

"The Lord of the Rings" has announced its arrival to the South French Riviera and will without doubt outshine any other event at the film festival. Thus, the company behind the movie has rented an entire castle outside Cannes and is planning to bring in pieces from the set in order to make the surroundings of the happening as perfect as possible.

Win a trip

The content is also being treated. 12 of the trilogy's main cast - among them Dane Viggo Mortensen, who plays Aragorn, and film-babe Liv Tyler, ditto Cate Blanchet, and the experienced gentlemen Ian Holm (Bilbo), Christopher Lee (Saruman), and Ian McKellen (Gandalf) - arrive in company with director Peter Jackson in Cannes to promote the three movies.

One can only speculate about how much of the trilogy that will be shown. According to the official Lord of the Rings movie Web site - that offers the chance to win a trip to Cannes for the unique event - it will only be a secret "appetizer", that will surely raise the hype to new heights.

Already, the whole project is one of the most talked about on the Web's entertainment sites, where even the smallest of rumors is discussed in various chat rooms.

From the beginning, "Lord of the Rings" has been covered in a cloak of secrecy. The movie set in New Zealand, where all three movies have been shot, was completely closed to the public. And now the a bit of the excitement will be revealed in Cannes in two months.