American writer, director producer Francis Ford Coppola will present his latest, Megalopolis, at the upcoming 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. It will compete for the Festival’s top prize, Palme d’Or. (Also read: Adam Driver says his Megalopolis character is inspired by director Francis Ford Coppola)

Coppola will be returning to Cannes on the picturesque French Riviera 45 years after he showed Apocalypse Now there. He won the top honour, sharing it with Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Blechtrommel. Five years before that, Coppola had won the Palme d’Or outright for The Conversation.

Megalopolis will screen at a grand gala on May 17.

About Megalopolis

The $120-million movie was funded by Coppola himself from the proceeds he got after selling a large part of his wine estate.

A passion project of his, the film was announced, delayed and abandoned many times in the decades it has been in the making. There were also times when some footage was a shot.

Cannes may be the ideal venue for Coppola to strike deals with buyers who will be thronging the Festival Market, one of the largest of its kind in the world. He had been, in recent weeks, screening his work to potential buyers in Hollywood. Universal’s Donna Langley, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and Sony’s Tom Rothman came for the show. Nothing concrete has emerged as of now, with the mixed views about the movie seemingly worrying. One studio head said “It’s so not good, and it was so sad watching it. Anybody who puts P&A behind it, you’re going to lose money.” Another quipped: “I liked it enormously.”

Not much of plot details are available, and as a Guardian report said “it has long been considered a difficult beast to film: an epic that spans ancient history and a cataclysmic future, riddled with esoterica and tortuous concepts” Megalopolis’ official logline describes it as a “story of political ambition, genius and conflicted love” where “the fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems”.

Who stars in Megalopolis?

Starring an ensemble cast of Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Chloe Fineman, Kathryn Hunter and Dustin Hoffman, the movie focusses on the rebuilding of a metropolis after it was accidentally destroyed. There are two streams of thought on how to go about it – one from an idealist architect (played by Adam Driver) and the other from the city’s pragmatic mayor (Giancario Esposito). What follows is a clash of ideas from the two men, each determined to push his own idea and see it on the drawing-board.

The Festival chief, Thierry Fremaux, said that “Megalopolis is a project that he wanted to achieve for so long and he did it independently, in his own way, as an artist. He built the legend of the Cannes Film Festival and it would be an honour to welcome him back, as a filmmaker who comes to present his new movie.”

The Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off May 14, has previously announced premieres for George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga.

On April 11, Fremaux will present the official lineup of films.