Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough, and Kenneth Branagh Head to Cannes Directors’ Fortnight

If your Cannes wish list didn’t entirely come true with last week’s competition announcement, you might find some of your hoped-for films in the Directors’ Fortnight lineup. On Tuesday, new films from filmmakers from Romania’s Radu Jude to Russian exile Kantemir Balagov and the UK’s Clio Barnard were all announced as part of the independent Cannes sidebar’s slate of standout contemporary cinema.

Nineteen features were announced as part of Directors’ Fortnight, which runs May 13 to 23 alongside the main event, the Cannes Film Festival official selection. The section’s artistic director, Julien Rejl, and his team feature several possible competition also-rans here, which is great news for fans of Barry Keoghan and Riley Keough, who star in Balagov’s English-language debut, “Butterfly Jam.” A film many speculated would be in competition, the third feature from the “Beanpole” director centers on a father-son relationship within a Circassian immigrant community of New Jersey. That’s the opening night film.

Jude, who has never passed through the Cannes competition but is a perennial Berlinale winner, will arrive at the Fortnight with a theater-world-adjacent comedy “The Diary of a Chambermaid”; “The Arbor” and “Ali & Ava” director Barnard, meanwhile, returns with a story of a 30-something friend group “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning”; Argentine “Jauja” director Lisandro Alonso will debut “Dobule Freedom”; and more.

Filmmaker Reed Van Dyk brings more star power to the Fortnight with “Atonement,” an Iraqi war veteran drama starring Kenneth Branagh, Hiam Abbass, and Boyd Holbrook. Neon’s contemporary, Nigeria-set “Mrs. Dalloway” interpretation, “Clarissa,” from directors Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri and starring Sophie Okonedo, also joins this lineup.

It wouldn’t be Cannes, of course, without a Quentin Dupieux film programmed somewhere, and more than once: The quirky French director Quentin Dupieux has “Full Phil” in the midnight section but also “Le Vertige” here as the closing night selection of the Fortnight. “Le Vertige” is an animated feature — a first for Dupieux — and so far mysterious.

“Butterfly Jam,” Kantemir Balagov (Opening Night Film)
“Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” William Greaves & David Greaves
“Femme De Chambre” (“The Diary of a Chambermaid”), Radu Jude
“Dora,” July Jung
“Gabin,” Maxence Voiseux
“Clarissa,” Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri
“L’espèce Explosive” (“Too Many Beasts”), Sarah Arnold
“Low Expectations,” Eivind Landsvik
“Double Freedom,” Lisandro Alonso
“We Are Aliens,” Kohei Kadowaki
“Merci D’être Venu” (“Thanks for Coming”), Alain Cavalier – Documentary
“I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning,” Clio Barnard
“Atonement,” Reed Van Dyk
“Shana” De Lila Pinell
“Death Has No Master,” Jorge Thielen Armand
“Carmen, L’oiseau Rebelle,” Sébastien Laudenbach
“9 Temples to Heaven,” Sompot Chidgasornpongse
“Le Vertige,” Quentin Dupieux (Closing Night Film)