- Last updated: May 11, 2026 | 08:45
Over the years, Cannes has programmed several other football films, including ‘Pele Forever’ (2005), a two-hour documentary promoted by the Brazilian legend himself and ‘Maradona by Kusturica’ (2008), made by Serbian director Emir Kusturica, writes Saibal Chatterjee
The 2026 FIFA World Cup to be jointly hosted by 16 cities in North America – 11 in the US, three in Mexico and two in Canada – is a month away. With as many as 48 teams taking part, up from 32, the World Cup has never been bigger.
In an era buffeted by severe geopolitical conflict, it is in the fitness of things that two major football-themed documentaries are all set to be unveiled in Cannes, which hosts the world’s biggest film festival, to get us all into the swing of things before the kick-off on June 11 at the Azteca Stadium, Mexico.
May 12, the opening day of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, will mark the start of the final-month countdown to the anticipated quadrennial sporting event. It is apt that one of the two films – The Match (Spanish title: El Partido), directed by Argentine filmmakers Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco – is about a historic World Cup encounter that took place between Argentina and England at the Azteca 40 years ago. It is a match that is still fresh in public memory.
The 91-minute documentary, part of the Festival’s Cannes Premiere section, recounts the pulsating 1986 World Cup game that was played in the wake of the Falklands War, an exciting game of football that instantly went down in history for Diego Maradona’s controversial “Hand of God” goal. It sealed the match for Argentina.
What transpired that evening at the Azteca Stadium carried resonances that originated from and went far beyond just the spectacle of two sets of combatants kicking a football – it was an accumulation and culmination of more than two hundred years of tension, encounters and conflict between two nations. They burst forth in the most dramatic manner. Pent-up emotions, reflective of dimensions emanating from beyond the arena, coursed all through the 90 minutes of the match, carrying it to heights that only the greatest of sporting clashes ever manage to scale. It was a football match for the ages. No wonder the world still remembers it vividly.
If the iconic, adrenaline-pumping 1986 England-Argentina World Cup match was pure drama, what of the eventful career of the enigmatic and trouble-prone French football legend-turned-actor Eric Cantona? The temperamental athlete courted controversy all through his career but went out on a high by winning four Premier League titles in five years with Manchester United, the club he played for from 1992 to 1997.
“Cantona,” a documentary that explores the life and career of the footballer, is part of the Special Screenings section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film will screen in the presence of Cantona, who has another film in the same section, this one as an actor.
The French fiction film, “Les Matin Merveilleux” (Marvellous Mornings), is directed by debutante Avril Besson and co-stars India Hair and Raya Martigny. Four years in the works, the Cantona documentary, directed by David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas, forays into the highs and lows of Cantona’s high-voltage career and draws on interviews with Sir Alex Ferguson, David Beckham and Guy Roux to piece together the story.
The credits of the directing pair behind the film include documentaries on “Pele” (for Netflix) and “Luis Figo” (The Figo Affair: The Transfer that Changed Football). The synopsis of the “Cantona” film reads: “The most gifted footballer of his generation was finished. Retired in disgrace at 25, he appeared destined for permanent exile from the sport he loved.” “Incapable of blind obedience, Eric Cantona was a libertine who bridled against conformity whenever he felt its grip tighten,” the synopsis continues. “The French branded him unmanageable. But the fire that burned in Eric became the spark to ignite a dynasty at Manchester United.”
It says further: “Cantona reveals how legendary manager Alex Ferguson channelled the brilliance of this most captivating and unpredictable of athletes. A tale of friendship and fatherhood, Cantona and Ferguson’s testimonies reveal how a man misread as hostile and unknowable was finally understood, loved, and forgiven, by the strictest disciplinarian in football.”
Cantona had frequent run-ins with authority. In 1995, he was handed an eight-month suspension from the game after being convicted of assaulting an abusive spectator. In another incident, he threw a ball at a referee and copped a one-month ban.
Cantona, who retired at the peak of his career aged 31, debuted as an actor in Shekhar Kapur’s historical drama “Elizabeth” (1998) immediately after he hung up his boots. A year shy of turning 60, he continues to act. Cantona was in Cannes in 2009 with “Looking for Eric,” directed by Ken Loach and starring the footballer as himself in a fictional story of a down-and-out middle-aged football-obsessed postman in Manchester who hallucinates about his sporting idol when he is at his lowest.
As for the festival itself, football has been a constant presence in recent years. In 2014, United Passions premiered in Cannes. Ninety per cent funded by FIFA, the film about the founding of the game’s governing organisation was roundly panned as propaganda.
One of the more unusual football films to ever screen at Cannes is “Zinedine Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait,” made in 2006 by two artists, Douglas Gordon and Philipp Parreno. The documentary focussed entirely on Zidane in real time (with 17 synchronised cameras) in the course of a single La Liga match between Real Madrid and Villarreal.
No less unusual was a 24-minute short film that played last year in the festival’s competitive La Cinef selection of student films. Made by Kokob Gebrehaweria Tesfay, a student of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata, “A Doll Made Up of Clay” homes in on a Nigerian who sells his father’s land back in his country to chase a football career in India. An injury ends his dream.
Over the years, Cannes has programmed several other football films, including “Pele Forever” (2005), a two-hour documentary promoted by the Brazilian legend himself; “Maradona by Kusturica” (2008), made by Serbian director Emir Kusturica; and “Diego Maradona” (2019), a documentary by British-Indian filmmaker Asif Kapadia. Maradona, the man with the golden feet, walked the red carpet back in 2008. Eighteen years later, “Cantona” will retrace the steps.