Actor Merab Ninidze in competition for Cannes Festival award

Georgian film actor Merab Ninidze will compete for top honours at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival after the feature drama Jupiter's Moon by Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo was announced as part of the official selection of the event on Thursday.

Ninidze plays one of four principal roles in Mundruczo's 2017 work, with fellow actors Gyorgy Cserhalmi, Monika Balsai and Zsombor Jeger cast in the other roles.

The script for the feature follows a young immigrant who is shot and wounded during his attempt to illegally cross a state border. The incident leaves the man able to levitate at will, a skill that sees him get smuggled out of a refugee camp by an interested doctor.

A still from 'Jupiter's Moon'. Photo: Screen Daily.

Jupiter's Moon will be part of the official competition of the anniversary 70th edition of the prestigious French festival, alongside films including L'Amant Double by Francois Ozon and Loveless by Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Ninidze will be in contention for the Best Actor award at the festival which will run in Cannes from May 17-28.

The Georgian actor's film career includes an appearance in the Oscar-winning 2001 drama Nowhere in Africa following his move to residences in Vienna and Berlin in the mid-1990s.

The filming of the feature drama took place in Hungary's capital Budapest. Photo: Merab Ninidze actor Facebook page.

Born in 1965, Ninidze's first film role was in the internationally acclaimed Soviet-era Georgian production Repentance by director Tengiz Abuladze. The young actor played the role of a member of an authoritarian ruler's family in the 1984 drama.

Ninidze was also cast in a number of post-Soviet Georgian films before and after his move to Europe.

Kornel Mundruczo has been widely honoured by the Cannes festival juries for his past works. The filmmaker's 2008 feature Delta received the FIPRESCI Award, with his 2014 production White God singled out for the Un Certain Regard Prize in 2014.