IN WHAT looks to be another promising year, Cannes Film Festival announced the line-up for its 77th edition. A selection showing once again it’s a festival that hasn’t stopped being political — political through the movies it shows, but also through the voices of artists who express themselves freely. This year Cannes seems intent on keeping its position as the pre-eminent festival, offering shelter and glory to directors unappreciated in their own country. Overall, it is interesting to notice how geopolitical turmoil shapes the Official Selection.  

Nineteen films will compete for the Palme D’Or, among them British director Andrea Arnold’s Bird, her fourth to be selected for competition. Little is known about the project filmed in the Kent area last summer, but it will, like much of Arnold’s work examine life on the fringes of society; her previous titles, Red Road, Fish Tank, concerned poverty and social alienation, while the last, American Honey offered a critique of capital in which it becomes apparent that the system is beyond repair.

Arnold is a filmmaker in the tradition of “stark” Brit social realists like Ken Loach and Alan Clarke. We hope she will be garlanded.

There are more US titles than last year and looks like, they will offer a stern look into the murky relations between money and politics in the US. We have the much-anticipated return of Francis Ford Coppola, a director whose work helped build the legend of the Cannes Film Festival.

 Megalopolis is his passion project, totally self-produced, with his vineyard, independent and yet fantastically expensive. It is an epic science-fiction movie, taking place in a futuristic New York, in the midst of reconstruction after a cataclysm. It follows an architect tormented by the dream of building a utopian new city who faces opposition from a very political conservative major.

Coppola, the director of The Godfather about immigrant aspiration and assimilation to America, went to the same military school as Donald Trump, a boarding school for young rich kids, but he admitted his frustration more than once about Trump and awful US politics.   

Megalopolis pairs with Ali Abassi’s The Apprentice, a biopic of young Donald Trump’s ascent to power through what is described as a “Faustian deal” with the influential right-wing lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn, examining Trump’s time as real estate businessman in the 1970s and ’80s. Expectations are that the film will cause a stir on both side of politic fence.

The third US film in competition is Sean Baker’s Anora, an adventure comedy-drama, which sees the director leave the margins of society for the first time to follow “wealthy” people.  

The creative and unpredictable Yorgos Lanthimos will bring Kinds of Kindness, coming soon after his audacious, impolite Poor Things. Canadian director David Cronenberg is back with The Shrouds, a horror thriller and exiled Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie.

Titles from female directors include Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, an explosive feminist movie; Indian director Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, three years after winning the festival’s documentary prize, and Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond, a contemporary coming-of-age story about a young girl who blossoms through a virtual persona on social media.

Also, Yolande Zauberman’s The Beauty of Gaza is a film about trans Palestinians who cross from Gaza to Tel Aviv to live their true identities. About this film, the artistic director, Thierry Fremaux said “No need to tell you that this film was written and filmed before the war and it takes on a particular resonance today and continues to explore this painful territory in our planet.”

Cannes is a festival that never ceases to shine a light on films that reflect the state of the world, year after year, and provides a strong indication of what cinema has become, its changes, evolutions and as well as what remains immutable.

In recent years the juries gave two Palmes d’Or to the Dardenne brothers, two to Ken Loach, one to Wajda during the Polish crisis in 1981, and one to Michael Moore, who denounced the war in Iraq in 2004.