Cannes 2026: the 79th edition’s lineup, the names, the politics, and the cinema
The 79th Festival de Cannes runs from 12 to 23 May 2026, opening with Pierre Salvadori’s 1920s-set comedy The Electric Kiss (La Venus electrique). Festival President Iris Knobloch and General Delegate Thierry Fremaux unveiled the bulk of the Official Selection on 9 April 2026 at the Pathe Palace in Paris, drawing from a pool of 2,541 feature submissions from 141 countries.
The Competition: auteurs over star wattage
This year’s main Competition is, by Cannes’ own standards, auteur-driven. Pedro Almodovar returns with Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad), the only selected title that had its world premiere before the festival itself. Asghar Farhadi brings Parallel Stories (Histoires Paralleles), with Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, and Pierre Niney. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Lukas Dhont, Laszlo Nemes, Pawel Pawlikowski, and Ira Sachs all feature.
Notable presences include Lukas Dhont’s First World War drama Coward — partially shot near Ypres — Laszlo Nemes’ Moulin, a biopic of French resistance leader Jean Moulin played by Gilles Lellouche, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, his first feature since 2017, shot in Latvia. James Gray’s Paper Tiger, with Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller, was added to the competition lineup later, completing it at 22 titles.
The jury and the honorary Palmes
South Korean director Park Chan-wook, whose Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and No Other Choice have shaped contemporary cinema, presides over the Feature Film Jury. Honorary Palmes d’Or will be awarded to Peter Jackson and Barbra Streisand, recognising bodies of work that span the popular and the critical.
Diversity, AI, and the in-theatre experience
The opening press conference foregrounded three editorial priorities. Female representation in the directing pool: five women filmmakers in the main competition. Cinema as human creation: Fremaux made a deliberate point of distinguishing festival cinema from AI-generated content, framing the selection as a defence of authored work. And the in-theatre experience, an annual Cannes refrain in the streaming era.
The parallel sections
The Critics’ Week selection, announced on 13 April, includes 11 first and second features chosen from a record 1,050 submissions. Artistic director Ava Cahen highlighted emerging filmmakers whose visions offer hope amidst a society in flux. The Directors’ Fortnight, announced on 14 April, opens with Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam and closes with Quentin Dupieux’s animated debut Vertiginous. Un Certain Regard, presided over by Leila Bekhti, foregrounds emerging auteur cinema, including Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
What Cannes is, in 2026
The 79th edition opens against a backdrop Knobloch acknowledged at the press conference: the news coming in from around the world has been anything but reassuring. The festival’s response — invoking the 1939 founding moment, when bringing artists together was not a luxury, it was a necessity — is also a statement about what Cannes still wants to be: a global meeting point where cinema’s commercial, artistic, and political dimensions collide for twelve days each May. For better and worse, no other festival in the world fills that role.
