This year’s Cannes film festival is set to kick off with Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, a star-studded zombie movie in which the undead battle local cops Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny and Adam Driver.
The comedy, which will be in contention for top prize the Palme d’Or, has been selected as the opening night movie on 14 May, and will be released in France on the same day, before premiering elsewhere in June.
The supporting cast, many of them Jarmusch regulars, includes Tilda Swinton, Selena Gomez, Steve Buscemi, Rosie Perez, Danny Glover, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits and Caleb Landry Jones.
Jarmusch won the Caméra d’Or first film prize in 1984 for Stranger Than Paradise and has returned to the festival with most of his films, including Paterson, which also starred Driver, in 2016. Other titles premiered by the director at Cannes include Broken Flowers, which starred Murray and Swinton, as well as Only Lovers Left Alive, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Dead Man, Mystery Train and Down By Law. Coffee and Cigarettes: Somewhere in California won the short film Palme d’Or in 1993.
Opening night picks at the festival in recent years have tended to the serious. Last year’s was Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows, a thriller featuring Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz.
This year’s Cannes jury will be chaired by Alejandro González Iñárritu. The festival will be on until 25 May and other titles rumoured to be playing include Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. No Netflix titles will screen at the festival after artistic director Thierry Frémaux failed to reach a compromise with Netflix boss Ted Sarandos over whether they would be eligible for competition.