2024 Cannes Film Festival: Payal Kapadia, Lanthimos, Baker, Gomes & Agathe Riedinger’s Debut Vie for Palme d’Or

With today’s announcement of nineteen competition titles aiming in contention of the Palme d’Or (note that we might add another pair or trio next week), Cannes Film Festival head topper Thierry Frémaux won’t make any new friends with those hoping for equal footing between male and female directors, but then we need to mention that in the quartet of women filmmakers, we have two sophomore features from the likes of Payal Kapadia (All We Imagine as Light) and Coralie Fargeat (The Substance) and following in the footsteps of last year’s inclusion of Ramata-Toulaye Sy we have Agathe Riedinger‘s coming of age film Diamant Brut (aka Wild Diamond) about a young girl (Malou Khebizi) who sees in reality TV the possibility of becoming famous. Andrea Arnold will shore up for her fourth time Bird — she has won three consecutive Jury Prize awards. Of the filmmakers who will have first appearances in the competition we find a trio in Magnus von Horn (The Girl With the Needle), Miguel Gomes (Grand Tour) and Gilles Lellouche (L’Amour Ouf). Apart from the new wave of filmmaker voices in Sean Baker (Anora) and Ali Abbasi (The Apprentice) we have ten veteran filmmakers including two former Palme winners. Jacques Audiard will surface with Emilia Perez and Francis Ford Coppola will be trying for his third Palme with Megalopolis. English language offerings in David Cronenberg‘s The Shrouds, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Kinds of Kindness, and Paul Schrader‘s Oh Canada go up against Christophe Honore‘s Marcello Mio, Jia Zhang-Ke‘s Caught by the Tides, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Limonov: The Ballad (the title was shortened), Paolo Sorrentino‘s Parthenope and Brazilian filmmaker Karim Ainouz makes it back to back years on the Croisette as he submits Motel Destino.