“Megalopolis” is the most anticipated film at the Cannes festival – Coppola worked on it for almost 30 years.

The second Darth Vader, Adam Driver, is in the lead role, but no details are available

The Cannes Film Festival has announced the program for this year’s edition. The main event should be veteran Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Even Adam Driver, who eventually played the main role in it – Darth Vader’s successor as the main space villain in “Star Wars”, admits that he can’t quite explain what the film is about.

Coppola returns to Cannes for the first time in decades, with a project that critics have yet to decide whether it’s utopia or dystopia. He has been working on Megalopolis for the past 30 years. The high-budget – so far it has swallowed over 100 million dollars, a radical and experimental film

according to the former

reviews delighted some

and outraged others

during the closed screening for friends and representatives of the film media. No one has yet committed to distribution, so its future depends on the presentation at Cannes.

Coppola, who turned 85 on April 7, enters the elite club of at least two Palme d’Or winners. At the same time, around 50 years have passed since the premiere and awarding of the first of the two films with which he won – the paranoid “The Conversation”. The second is Apocalypse Now – one of the best anti-war dramas of all time.

At the end of the 20th century, the genius director, whose films were reviewed either as great or as talentless, but never as impersonal, surprisingly gave up the box office. His films from this period “Youth without Youth” and “Tetro” are so unconventional that even in Cannes they are shown only in parallel programs. Whether Coppola has succeeded in his dream project in combining the innovative spirit with the emotional power of his early projects will become clear very soon.

But the Cannes festival program will also offer films by other veterans. The new philosophical horror of the 81-year-old Canadian David Cronenberg “Savannah” with Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in the main roles tells about the relationship of the living with the deceased dear to their hearts. The hero develops an application that can monitor the degree of decomposition of a body directly from the grave. But when several are unearthed and looted, he rethinks his philosophy of life.

Paul Schroder’s (77) drama Oh Canada stars Richard Gere and Uma Thurman. It tells the story of Leonard Fife, a terminally ill left-wing documentary filmmaker who flees to Canada to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. Shortly before dying of cancer in Montreal, he agrees to give his last interview, in which he reveals all his secrets, to his former student and longtime assistant and his wife, who had previously admired him. Now they will obviously have to rethink their impressions.

Of course, the young ones don’t give up either. Great expectations are connected to last year’s winner of the “Golden Lion” from the Venice festival, Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Creatures”). At one time, it was the Cannes festival that opened him with the film “Dog’s Tooth” and now he is jealous of Venice, because it was there that he was awarded the big prize for the first time. Now he is involved with “Kinds of Kindness”. Critics have described it as a triptych tale of a man with no choice who tries to take control of his life, a policeman worried that his wife, who disappeared at sea years ago, has returned, and a woman determined to find a special person destined to become an amazing spiritual leader. Starring the “usual suspects” from “Despicable Creatures” William Dafoe, Emma Stone and Margaret Quoley.

The list also includes one of the most relevant and modern directors in contemporary cinema – Paolo Sorrentino (“Oscar” for non-English language film in 2014 with “The Great Beauty”) participated with “Partenope”. The title is from the name of one of the Sirens who tried to lure and destroy Odysseus on his return to Ithaca. Again, the film (after the autobiographical “Hand of God”) was shot in his native Naples.

Probably the most influential person in Chinese auteur cinema, Ji Zhangke, will present his new film “In the Power of the Tides”, and Ali Abbasi, an Iranian living and working in Scandinavia – “The Intern”, which is a fictional biography of the young Donald Trump.

This category also includes Kiril Serebrennikov with “Limonov”, where the infamous Soviet writer, dissident and politician was played by the British Ben Shaw. Outside the competition program, they will show “Horizon” by Kevin Costner, and the honorary “Golden Palm” will be awarded to George Lucas.