India, May 21 -- The loudest cheer at the 78th Cannes Film Festival was reserved for a new black and white movie about the making of a movie some 65 years ago.

Nouvelle Vogue (New Wave) by American director Richard Linklater recreates the scenes of shooting legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's debut feature film, Breathless, in 1960. Cleverly mixing Godard's radical ideas of filmmaking with famous quotes on art from great minds like Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Gaugin, Nouvelle Vogue transports today's movie-goer to the middle of the last century, coinciding with an era of counterculture.

Transporting the audience to the past is a unifying theme this year among filmmakers around the world. Nearly half of the movies in the prestigio...