The red-carpet men are busy on the south coast of France this week as the world gets set for the Cannes film festival, which starts on Wednesday. However, the event is almost as famous for its storm-in-a-teacup controversies as the films it shows.

The strike (2004)
No one does strikes better than grouchy Frenchmen. With disgruntled arts workers threatening to disrupt Cannes 2004 in a row over unemployment benefits, a crisis was averted when festival bigwigs cut a deal to allow them to protest in an orderly fashion.

The angry heavyweights (2006)
When Eric Schlosser’s antijunk food book Fast Food Nation was made into a film starring Ethan Hawke more than a dozen rich trade groups that had made big money out of beef launched a campaign to try to dismiss Schlosser’s film as “indigestible propaganda”.

The boos (2003)
Vincent Gallo directed and starred in the offbeat road movie The Brown Bunny, which hit Cannes in a wave of controversy over graphic sex scenes. Booed by audiences, it was quickly branded “the worst film in the history of Cannes”.

The political hot potato (2007)
Iran can be touchy at the best of times, but last year it took offence at the screening of Persepolis, based on the comic books of Iranian expat Marjane Satrapi. Iran labelled its inclusion a “political act”.