CANNES 2026: All eyes on Competition newbies

The 79th Cannes Film Festival, which opens on Tuesday evening with Pierre Salvadori’s La Venus Electrique, has two Palme d’Or winners, Cristian Mungiu and Hirokazu Kore-eda, vying for the top prize again. Around them are formidable contenders looking to get their hands around the trophy for the first time. The most prominent of them are Pedro Almodovar with Bitter Christmas and Asghar Farhadi with his second French film, Parallel Tales.

The two Cannes Competition regulars will start as frontrunners when the jury chaired by South Korean director Park Chan-wook begins watching the 21 films in the fray. Both Mungiu, who won the Palme d’Or in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and Kore-eda, whose Shoplifters bagged the award in 2018, are back in the Competition with films unlike any they have made before.

Mungiu’s Fjord is the Romanian director’s first English-language debut and the first film he has shot entirely outside his country. Kore-eda’s Sheep in the Box is a sci-fi film, a new genre for the Japanese auteur. Fjord stars Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan and Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve as a couple whose behaviour with their children provokes intense scrutiny after they move to the wife’s remote Norwegian hometown.

Gentle Monster by Marie Kreutzer.

Kore-eda’s seventh film in Cannes Competition is set in the near future. When her child passes away, an architect and her husband welcome a humanoid robot into their home. Andrey Zvyagintsev has won an award every single time he has had a film to Cannes. The Russian filmmaker competes this year with Minotaur, his first film since 2017, the year Loveless bagged the Cannes Jury Prize.

Minotaur marks Zvyagintsev’s return to filmmaking after a severe bout of illness led to him being hospitalised and placed in an artificial coma. The film is about a Russian business executive who discovers that his wife is having an affair while he gears up to lay off a number of employees.

Another highly fancied Competition title this year is Pawel Pawlikowski’s black-and-white Fatherland. The UK-based Polish director won the best director award at Cannes in 2018 for Cold War.

Sandra Hüller (left) and Hanns Zischler in a scene from 'Fatherland.'

Fatherland features Hans Zischler as Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and Sandra Huller as his daughter Erika. The two embark on a road trip from Frankfurt, West Germany, to Weimar, East Germany, during the Cold War. Belgian helmer Lukas Dhont, 34, is the youngest Palme d’Or hopeful this year. His third film, Coward, a World War 1-set drama about a soldier who discovers love and art while questioning entrenched notions of heroism and cowardice.

Oscar and Cannes Grand Prix winner, Hungarian Laszlo Nemes, competes with his French-language film Moulin, a biopic that follows Jean Moulin and his French Resistance workers during World War 2. A third past Palme d’Or laureate in the Cannes 2026 official selection is 87-year-old Volker Schlondorff but he isn’t competing. Visitation, his first feature-length fiction film in nearly a decade, is in Cannes Premiere.

Fjord by Cristian Mungiu.

It homes in on a lakeshore house near Berlin that has stood witness to a century of tumultuous history. Generations come and go as regimes change and humanity adapts to a world in constant flux. Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum (1979) won the Palme d’Or back when none of the directors in Cannes Competition this year had started making films. Some were not even born.

Austrian director Marie Kreutzer, 48, who is competing in Cannes for the first time ever, or French filmmaker Jeanne Herry, 47, also a Competition newbie, were just toddlers. Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster, starring Lea Seydoux and Catherine Deneuve, is a drama about two women – one, a renowned Munich pianist who moves to a village to support her partner after he suffers a burnout and the other a special investigator who has to care for her ailing father. The two confront dark truths about the men in their lives.

The Birthday Party by Léa Mysius.

Herry’s Another Day, her fourth film, revolves around a joyful and tenacious actress who courts trouble due to her erratic behaviour. A host of others are making their Cannes Competition debuts this year, including France’s Emmanuel Marre, with his second feature Notre Salut (A Man of His Time), and German helmer Valeska Grisebach with her fourth directorial, The Dreamed Adventure.

Nor is that all. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, with her second film A Woman’s Life and Arthur Harari, with his third film, The Unknown, a psychological fantasy film based on a graphic novel he co-wrote with his brother Lucas, also get their first shots at the Palme d’Or. The Unknown (French title: L’Inconnue) follows a man who wakes up in the body of a woman with whom he has a one-night stand after a wild party. Going by its plot, it promises to be one of the more intriguing films in Cannes.

The Dreamed Adventure by Valeska Grisebach.

Bitter Christmas by Pedro Almodovar.

Also competing in Cannes for the first time are Japanese director Koji Fukada, whose Nagi Notes revolves around a sculptor and her former sister-in-law, Korean director Na Hong-jin, whose sci-fi thriller Hope has a cast that includes Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, and Spanish directing pair Javier Calco and Javier Ambrossi (The Black Ball), starring Penelope Cruz and Glenn Close. Lea Mysius, 37, too, is debuting in Competition with a home invasion thriller The Birthday Party, featuring Hafsia Herzi, Monica Bellucci and Benoit Magimel.

The final first-timer is Spain’s Rodrigo Sorogoyen, whose The Beloved is in the ring. Last but not least are Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose Drive My Car (2021) won the Oscar for the Best International Feature Film, and two American directors, Ira Sachs and James Gray.

This year, the Hamaguchi entry is All of a Sudden, Paris-set film starring Virginie Efira and Japanese model and actress Tao Okamoto, while Gray is in the fray with Paper Tiger. Sachs’ competes with The Man I Love. Over to the jury. May the best film win.