Filmmaker and University of Kansas professor Kevin Willmott is pictured in this file photo from November 2011.

Lawrence filmmaker and University of Kansas professor Kevin Willmott is heading to Cannes next month.

Willmott’s newest film, “BlackKklansman,” which he co-wrote with director Spike Lee, will be featured in the competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the south of France. It’s the second time Willmott, a professor of film and media studies at KU, has collaborated with Lee. The two co-wrote Lee’s 2015 satire “Chi-Raq.”

For “BlackKklansman,” Willmott and the “Do the Right Thing” director have adapted the 2014 memoir of Ron Stallworth, the first black police officer in Colorado Springs, Colo. Both the book and the upcoming movie tell the story of how Stallworth, now retired, went undercover to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in 1979.

“BlackKklansman” will screen at the Cannes Film Festival, which runs May 8 to May 19, before opening in the U.S. this August. The official premiere is set for Aug. 10, the anniversary of last year’s neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va.