Movies by some of cinema’s most revered directors are among the 21 titles that will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced on Thursday, revealing a lineup that leans heavily toward auteur filmmakers.
Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish director best known for the critically acclaimed art house titles “Cold War” and “Ida,” will premiere “Fatherland,” about the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist Thomas Mann, and Pedro Almodóvar will show “Bitter Christmas,” which has already opened in movie theaters in his native Spain.
Other movies in the competition include “Parallel Tales” by the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, “Moulin” by the Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, “Minotaur” by Andrey Zvyagintsev of Russia and “Fjord” by Christian Mungiu or Romania.
Only one movie by an American director is in the running: Ira Sachs’s “The Man I Love” a musical set in 1980s New York against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis and starring Rami Malek.
Other American directors are showing films out of the main competition, however, including Jane Schoenbrun, who’ll premiere “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” starring Gillian Anderson and the “Hacks” actress Hannah Einbinder. John Travolta will show “Propeller One-Way Night Coach,” his directorial debut about an airplane enthusiast taking a flight to Hollywood.
Ron Howard will also be in Cannes to show “Avedon,” a documentary about the photographer Richard Avedon; Steven Soderbergh will premiere the documentary “John Lennon: The Last Interview”; and Andy Garcia will show a film noir called “The Diamond.”
Cannes has long held a reputation for debuting movies that go on to secure prizes in awards season. Last year’s lineup included the debuts of the Brazilian drama “The Secret Agent” and Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” both of which went onto secure nominations for the Best Picture award at this year’s Oscars.
This year’s lineup includes movies by many similarly respected directors, although it does not include any of the big Hollywood studio releases that critics have predicted to generate awards buzz, including Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” and Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day.”
Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s director, said in an interview with Variety last month that those movies would not be not ready in time to debut at Cannes. Their absence is not a sign that Hollywood studios are avoiding Cannes, he added. “When Hollywood studios believe that a presence at Cannes is beneficial to them, they come,” Frémaux said.
This year’s 79th edition of the festival is scheduled to open May 12 and run through May 23, when a jury led by Park Chan-wook, the South Korean director of “Oldboy” and “The Handmaiden,” will announce the Palme d’Or winner during a ceremony.
Each edition of Cannes also includes the awarding of at least one honorary Palme d’Or to acknowledge a contributions to cinema. This year, Barbra Streisand and Peter Jackson, the director of the “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy, are due to receive the honor.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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