The official competition section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival will be full of established directors, few female filmmakers (four out of 19) and no Spanish names. We will have to wait for the parallel sections or last minute announcements to find out if anyone has any chance of reaching the Croisette. One of the most anticipated events will be the return of double Palme d’Or winner Francis Ford Coppola with Megalopolisa film with Adam Driver that he has self-financed with about 120 million dollars, according to Variety, and that is raising conflicting passions even before its release, while it searches for a distributor. The person responsible for the saga The Godfather will face such relevant filmmakers as the Italian Paolo Sorrentino, Paul Schrader, David Cronenberg, Yorgos Lanthimos and Jacques Audiard, as announced this Thursday by the director of the competition, Thierry Frémau

Those films will be the ones that fight, for now (Pacifiction by Albert Serra, for example, was not announced during the first press conference of 2022 but later entered), for the Palme d’Or in the 71st edition of the festival to be held from May 14 to 25. Last year, the award was given to Anatomy of a fall by Justine Triet, who became the third director to win it. This year there will be four directors: Andrea Arnold with Bird; Coralie Fargeat with The Substance; Payal Kapadia with All We Imagine as Light and Agathe Riedinger with Diamond Brut. The person responsible for BarbieGreta Gerwig, will preside over the jury of the official section.

One of the most curious elections of the contest is that of The Apprenticea kind of biography of Donald Trump starring Sebastian Stan (famous for being Bucky Barnes in the Marvel universe and Tommy Lee in Pam and Tommy) about his rise in the real estate business in New York, directed by an author as unexpected as the Iranian Ali Abbasi, responsible for the disconcerting Border and Holy Spider and who has also joined the team for the second season of The Last of Us. The other international projects announced include Destination Motelby Brazilian Karim Ainouz, the Danish The Girl with the Needleby Magnus Von Horn and the Italian Pathenopeby Paolo Sorrentino with Gary Oldman as the protagonist.

The stars will arrive, as expected, from the hand of Francis Ford Coppola, who already won the Palme d’Or with The conversation and Apocalypse Now. This time he has brought together one of the stars of the moment Adam Driver as an architect who wants to rebuild New York as a utopia alongside a massive cast that includes Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Forest Whitaker and his nephew Jason Schwartzmann. The director’s first film in 13 years (since Twixt), an idea that had been in his head since the eighties, is self-financing thanks to the sale of part of his wine businesses.

Cronenberg, for his part, will present The Shrouds, a new twist to his twilight science fiction starring a businessman who builds a device to talk to the dead. Only months after the Golden Lion poor creaturesYorgos Lanthimos reunites with Oscar winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley in the short story triptych Kind of Kindess. And, if those weren’t enough names, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Wild bullPaul Schrader, has joined in Oh Canada his seniority to one of the fashionable faces of cinema, Jacob Elordi, as one of the thousands of deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam.

The festival will open with Le deuxième acte, by Frenchman Quentin Dupieux, a director known for his surreal comedies. Also out of competition, other highly anticipated titles such as the film Furiosa: A Mad Max Sagaby George Miller and the first part of Horizon, an American saga, with Kevin Costner returning to the American West. The person responsible for Star WarsGeorge Lucas, will receive the Palme d’Or of Honor