Baku, April 5, AZERTAC

The 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will kick off with Quentin Dupieux‘s “The Second Act,” a star-studded surreal French comedy headlined by Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel and Raphaël Quenard, Variety has learned.

The anticipated movie is produced by Hugo Selignac at Chi-Fou-Mi, a Mediawan company, and is represented in international markets by Kinology. The film will play out of competition on May 14 and will be released on the same day in French theaters.

Laced with absurdist humor, the meta movie follows actors starring in a doomed film production. Dupieux is one of France’s most popular and prolific filmmakers. He delivered two films in 2023: “Daaaaaalí,” which played out-of-competition at Venice, and “Yannick,” a French box office hit that sold around the world.

In confirming the film’s selection at Cannes, the festival described Quentin as a “filmmaker who embraces freedom – in tone, form and subject” and a director who” has freed himself from convention through an already extensive body of work (13 feature films in 17 years), establishing the absurd as a genre in its own right and shaking up all the others – of which ‘The Second Act’ is a perfect case in point!”

The premiere of “The Second Act” on opening night at Cannes will mark Dupieux’s debut in the festival’s out-of-competition section. He previously presented “Smoking Causes Coughing” which played in the Midnight Screenings section. His best-known credits include “Rubber,” a California desert-set horror comedy; the Sundance-premiering film “Wrong”; and “Deerskin,” which bowed at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight.

The Cannes Film Festival also revealed that the glamorous opening night red carpet for “The Second Act” will bring together a flurry of French stars who previously starred in Dupieux’s movies, including Alain Chabat, Benoît Poelvoorde, Jean Dujardin, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Drucker, Benoît Magimel, Anaïs Demoustier, Vincent Lacoste, Gilles Lellouche, Édouard Baer and Pio Marmaï.

As previously reported, Greta Gerwig will preside over the jury of this upcoming edition which will take place May 14-25. The lineup will be unveiled by Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Fremaux at the annual press conference set for April 11.

While the selection remains under wraps, the festival recently confirmed that George Miller’s “Furiosa” will play at the festival. Other hotly anticipated films rumored to be part of this year’s Cannes roster include Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Kinds of Kindness,” the helmer’s mysterious follow-up to “Poor Things,” which reunites him with Emma Stone and distributor Searchlight Pictures; Jacques Audiard’s musical melodrama “Emilia Perez” starring Zoë Saldaña and Selena Gomez; David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds” starring Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger; Babak Anvari’s “Hallow Road” starring Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys; Audrey Diwan’s “Emmanuelle” starring Noemie Merlant and Noemie Watts; Gilles Lellouche’s “L’Amour Ouf” starring Adele Exarchopoulos and Francois Civil; Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” starring Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski; and possibly Francis Ford Coppola‘s self-produced epic “Megalopolis” with Adam Driver and Forest Whitaker.