You can certainly say that about her other film at the festival, Je Veux Voir (I Want To See). In an absorbing mix of fiction and fact, Deneuve plays herself – or at least a version of herself – as she travels to Lebanon to see the devastation of the war that broke out in the country in July 2006. Much of the film consists of her travelling with a local actor (Rabih Mroue) by car to the area. Such is the naturalistic style that it’s as if Deneuve is starring in an Abbas Kiarostami film. “I felt that I had to play myself but not as Catherine Deneuve,” she says. “I had the impression I was in between myself as a person and myself as an actress.”

Deneuve is quietly political – in the past she has also protested in favour of abortion and against the death penalty – and it’s not the first time that she has got involved in a film about the Middle East. Last year in Cannes she was one of the voices in Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical animated film Persepolis.