The selections for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival have been announced despite this year’s live event being cancelled.
Among those to make the list are Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and two films by Steve Mcqueen, titled Lover’s Rock and Mangrove.
Ammonite, directed by British filmmaker Francis Lee and starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, was also selected in the list of 56 films.
The French event, one of the key dates in the film industry calendar, had been scheduled to take place last month but was cancelled because of coronavirus.
In a statement, the festival’s artistic director Thierry Fremaux said “cancellation has never been an option” for the organisers.
He added: “In 2020, if the international film festival could not take its usual form, it was necessary for it to take another form. It could not just disappear.
“It was also because of the filmmakers’ hard work that we didn’t want to give up.
“We couldn’t send everyone to 2021. So we continued our selection. And it was the right decision.
“By choosing to work until the end to establish a selection, we received more than 2,000 feature films, 2,067 to be precise.”
The 2020 selection featured 16 female directors, up from 14 last year.