The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, American Wes Anderson and his collection of stars, French Julia Ducournau competing for a second Palme d'Or, and Belgians Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne aiming for a third, will compete at the 78th Cannes Film Festival.

Six female directors are among the approximately 20 filmmakers whose films were announced by general delegate Thierry Frémaux at a press conference on Thursday.

Both aged 38, French actress and director Hafsia Herzi will make her competition debut, as will the new American master of horror Ari Aster, who cast Joaquin Phoenix in a film about municipal elections in a small United States town.

In other sections or out of competition, the festival will feature the directorial debut of American star Scarlett Johansson and that of another actor, Harris Dickinson (Sans filtre, Babygirl), a feature around Bono, the U2 frontman, or an adaptation of The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, a novel by Olivier Guez, by exiled Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov.

On the French side, the official selection includes the new film by Cédric Klapisch, a fiction inspired by the life of billionaire Liliane Bettencourt with Isabelle Huppert, a feature film by Rebecca Zlotowski with Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil, or an adaptation of the novel Connemara by Nicolas Mathieu, by Alex Lutz.

The festival had already announced the out-of-competition screening of the final installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise with Tom Cruise, as well as the awarding of an honorary Palme d'Or to Robert De Niro.

The official selection will be completed next week, before the opening on May 13 of the festival, whose jury will be chaired by Juliette Binoche. The event will be opened by a debut feature film by French director Amélie Bonnin.

This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.