Donald Trump biopic and new films by Yorgos Lanthimos and Andrea Arnold to premiere at Cannes

Donald Trump, impersonated by Marvel actor Sebastian Stan, will make an unlikely star attraction on the Côte d’Azur in May, as a new film about the US presidential candidate’s real-estate career is set to premiere at Cannes in May.

The lineup for the 77th edition of the film festival, unveiled at a press conference in Paris on Thursday by general delegate Thierry Frémaux and president Iris Knobloch, will also see Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone continue their prize-winning creative partnership, and British film-maker Andrea Arnold team up with Saltburn star Barry Keoghan for her first fiction feature film in eight years.

Running in the competition are also new films by David Cronenberg, Taxi Driver scriptwriter Paul Schrader, Cannes veteran Jacques Audiard and Francis Ford Coppola’s previously announced passion project Megalopolis.

While the main programme does not quite match last year’s vintage selection for star-studdedness, it hinted at several intriguing – and often political – storylines.

In The Apprentice, Sweden-based Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi will examine Trump’s career as a real estate businessman in New York in the 1970s and 80s. Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan, best known as Bucky Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will impersonate the orange-faced US presidential candidate, while Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn, the attorney who represented Trump in the 1970s.

Running outside the competition, meanwhile, Canadian arthouse favourite Guy Maddin’s new film Rumours will see Cate Blanchett play an Ursula von der Leyen-esque politician at a fictional G7 meeting.

Running in the competition, Greek director Lanthimos’s anthology film Kinds of Kindness, which again features Willem Dafoe, comes just two months after his last film Poor Things’ glory at the Oscars, and less than a year after scooping the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival.

Dartford-born Arnold (Red Road,

Fish Tank, Cow) will not only receive the Golden Coach award at the festival but also show her new feature, Bird, her first since 2016’s American Honey. Frémaux described it as a coming-ofage story about a young girl trying to escape from the narrow confines of the neighbourhood she grew up in.

Ben Whishaw plays Russian poet and political dissident Eduard Limonov in director Khiril Sebrennikov’s Limonov: The Ballad, an adaptation of the feted novel by French writer Emma