Although he is still confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Julian Assange will make an appearance at the Cannes film festival – via Laura Poitras’s documentary Risk, which has been selected for the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar.

Poitras, who profiled another celebrated data warrior, Edward Snowden, in Citizenfour, filmed with Assange in 2010 (although the pair are reportedly not now on good terms). Her film – originally entitled Asylum – is said to cover the period when the WikiLeaks data dumps were triggering international outrage.

The Directors’ Fortnight also features work by a clutch of high-profile international auteurs, including new films by the 87-year-old Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky (with Endless Poetry, described as “an ode to the search for beauty”), Pablo Larraín (who reunites with Gael García Bernal for political thriller Neruda), and Paul Schrader (with Dog Eat Dog, an adaptation of Ed Bunker’s novel).

Watch the trailer for Pablo Larraín’s Neruda

Also picked for screening in the Directors’ Fortnight are Tour de France, featuring Gérard Depardieu as an older racist person forced to travel across France with a young rapper, Claude Barras’s stop motion animation My Life As a Courgette, about a kid in a care home, and Sweet Dreams, by Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio, adapted from a novel about a boy who lost his mother when he was nine.

The Directors’ Fortnight selection is the final piece of the Cannes puzzle, following the announcement of the Critics’ Week lineup on Monday. In subtle rebuke to the official Cannes selection, Critics’ Week is dominated by female film-makers, with Justine Triet’s In Bed With Victoria, a crime thriller featuring Virginie Efira as the eponymous criminal defence lawyer, selected as the opening film. Three short films – including Chloë Sevigny’s adaptation of the Paul Bowles novel Kitty – will be the closers.