Hollywood star power will vie with world cinema for the top prize next month at the 67th Cannes International Film Festival.
Winter Sleep, by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is one of the 18 films announced on Thursday in the prestigious main line-up, which also includes entries from Canada, Russia, Italy and Japan, highlighting the international breadth of what the artistic director Thierry Frémaux called "cinema's great rendezvous".
There are a couple of big names, too: Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au Langage, which he shot in 3-D; Tommy Lee Jones's drama The Homesman, starring Meryl Streep and Hilary Swank; and two-time winners of the Palme d'Or, the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne compete with Deux Jours, Une Nuit (Two Days, One Night) starring Marion Cotillard.
Aside from Godard, representing French cinema are Bertrand Bonello's biopic Saint Laurent, Olivier Assayas's Sils Maria starring Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart, and The Search, a drama set in war-torn Chechnya by The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius.
Featuring in the main line-up are two female directors – Italy's Alice Rohrwacher with Le Meraviglie and Futatsume No Mado (Two Windows) from Japan's Naomi Kawase.
Canadian movies feature prominently, with David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, a critique of Hollywood starring Robert Pattinson; Atom Egoyan's The Captive; and Xavier Dolan's Mommy.
The British auteurs Ken Loach and Mike Leigh will also compete, respectively, with Jimmy's Hall, about the Irish communist leader Jimmy Gralton, and Mr Turner, about the British painter J M W Turner.
Also in competition are Leviafan by Russia's Andrey Zvyagintsev, Timbuktu by Mauritania's Abderrahmane Sissako and Relatos Salvajes by Argentina's Damián Szifron.
Opening the May 14 to 25 festival is an out-of-competition screening of Grace of Monaco, a biopic starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Olivier Dahan. The Bollywood actor Uday Chopra, one of the film's producers, has confirmed his attendance at the festival.
The Indian actors Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor and Freida Pinto are also flying in to participate in the festival's events.
The parallel Un Certain Regard festival, which focuses on emerging directors, features Kanu Behl's drama Titli (Butterfly), the only Indian entry at this year's edition. Produced by Dibakar Banerjee and Yash Raj Films, it stars Ranvir Shorey, Amit Sial and the newcomer Shashank Arora.
Titli is competing against 19 other films in Un Certain Regard, including Lost River, the directorial debut of Ryan Gosling.
Eau Argentée, directed by the prominent Syrian filmmaker Mohammed Ossama, is getting a special screening.
* The National staff with agencies
