No stars, no swag, but what a crowd!

PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA — You know you're not in Cannes when the all-female marching band, wearing white go-go boots, belts out communist anthems at the opening ceremony.

This is a film festival like none other in the world.

There are no movie stars, no paparazzi, hardly any press. No studio executives doing deals on their BlackBerrys -- cellphones and other wireless devices are banned in North Korea.

For that matter, so are most movies. North Korea is the closest thing the world has to a hermetically sealed society. There is no Internet. Radios and televisions are welded to government stations. Yet every two years since 1987, North Korea has opened its doors, and its screens, just enough to host the Pyongyang International Film Festival.

Back in the days when North Korea had allies, it was called the "Film Festival of Non-Aligned and Other Developing Countries." Now that the government in Pyongyang has few real friends, it accepts entries from countries that are at least not overtly hostile.

Hollywood need not apply.

"It is practically the only occasion where North Koreans can see foreign films," said Uwe Schmelter, who heads the Japan office of the Goethe Institute, the German cultural organization that supplied Germany's films to the festival.

The film festival is thought to have been the brainchild of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who spent much of his youth obsessed with movies and is believed to have a personal library of 20,000 titles.

As the band played on for last month's opening ceremony, an unlikely mingling of Communist Party apparatchiks and European filmmakers filed up a long ramp past a row of Korean movie posters at the Pyongyang International Cinema, a poured-concrete structure with a spiral design that must have looked very modernistic in the 1980s.

Although the sun was still high over the capital on the unseasonably warm afternoon, most people wore black, the North Korean cadres buttoned into stiff business suits with the obligatory badges of founding father Kim Il Sung on their lapels, the European men in jeans.

Adding a little glamour, a few of the visiting women wore diaphanous sleeveless outfits, their blond hair cascading over bared shoulders, a curious sight in a country where people are not expected to show arms, knees or midriffs.