What to expect at Cannes: Heavyweights, history lessons and an abundance of animation

If the Cannes Film Festival has built its reputation over the years as the most influential entertainment event in the world on style and substance (read glamour and arthouse), the current edition opening on May 12 promises to be no different.

Two Nobel Literature Prize winners will be present in the French Riviera town of Cannes, a former fishing village, as the biggest movie stars gather to create the makeshift capital of the entertainment industry in the next fortnight.

Wole Soyinka, the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and J M Coetzee, the literary world's most reticent member, are expected to join cinematic heavyweights Pedro Almodovar, Asghar Farhadi, Hirokazu Koreeda, Cristian Mungiu and Steven Soderbergh at the Croisette.

Nigerian writer Soyinka will be the highlight of the African pavilion at the Cannes Film Market, the biggest film market in the world, while the South African-born Coetzee comes with a movie, Aqui, the single-film adaptation of his famed Jesus trilogy.

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The representation of Indian cinema in Cannes this year is paper thin, reduced to a restored 1986 feature film (the iconic Malayalam film, Amma Ariyan by John Abraham) in the classics category and a diploma film (the Punjabi language Parchave Masseah Rataan De (Shadows of the Moonless Nights) by Film and Television Institute of India, Pune alumnus Mehar Malhotra about the life of a warehouse worker, only two years after Payal Kapadia made history by winning the festival's Grand Prix, its second-biggest award, for All We Imagine As Light.

Shadows of the Moonless Nights by Film and Television Institute of India, Pune alumnus Mehar Malhotra is competing in the festival's film schools category (Photo: Cannes Film Festival)

Auteur-driven festival

Celebrated Spanish director Almodovar returns to Cannes this year with his new film, Bitter Christmas (original Spanish title Amarga Navidad), which tells two stories separated by two decades and called a "rebellion against cinema" in terms of creativity and reality.

Spanish director Pedro Almodovar is vying for his first Palme d'Or with his new film, Bitter Christmas (Photo: Cannes Film Festival)

The prestigious competition category for the festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, considered the high table of world cinema, is shared this year by Almodovar, Iranian Farhadi, Japanese filmmaker Koreeda, Romanian director Mungiu and American filmmaker James Gray.

There are five women directors vying for the Palme d'Or: French filmmakers Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet (A Woman's Life), Jeanne Herry (Another Day) and Léa Mysius (The Birthday Party), German Valeska Grisebach (The Dreamed Adventure), and Austrian Marie Kreutzer (Gentle Monster).

According to Cannes Festival's Artistic Director Thierry Frémaux, only 25 per cent of the 2,541 films submitted to the festival were directed by women, though the number 2,541 was 1,000 more than 10 years ago. As many as 141 countries sent in their submissions this year. "We are getting close to Olympic figures," jokes Frémaux. But on a serious note, he admits the quarter share of film entries this year denotes "not a great number of female filmmakers".

Almodovar has yet to win the Palme d'Or, already bagged by Koreeda in 2018 for Shoplifters and Mungiu for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007. Koreeda's new film, Sheep in the Box, talks about Artificial Intelligence; it is the story of an adopted humanoid boy. Like his 2013 film, The Past, Farhadi's new film, Parallel Tales, is also set in Paris and in the French language, with Isabelle Huppert playing a writer spying on her neighbours for inspiration. Mungiu also headed West for his latest venture, Fjord, set in Norway.

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi's Parallel Tales, set in Paris, is also part of the prestigious competition section (Photo: Cannes Film Festival)

Lessons from history

The famous life of legendary South American guerrilla chief Che Guevara is revisited in a new animation-heavy documentary that premieres in the Special Screenings section at Cannes. Che Guevara: The Last Companions, by French director Christophe Dimitri Reveille, offers fresh insights about the revolutionary through interviews with three of his last companions who escaped from Bolivia following Che's execution there in 1967.

A new documentary, Che Guevara: The Last Companions, provides new insights into the revolutionary (Photo: Cannes Film Festival)

John Lennon: The Last Interview, by American director Soderbergh, also in the Special Screenings category, uses archival material and AI to show the Beatles icon's last interview on the radio, just hours before his assassination on December 8, 1980.

John Lennon: The Last Interview by American director Soderbergh is based on the Beatles icon's interview hours before his assassination in 1980 (Photo: Cannes Film Festival)

Besides the presence of Farhadi, Iran is on the screen again in Cannes through Rehearsals For a Revolution by Pegah Ahangarani, who retraces four decades of history of her country from the revolution in 1979 to the war on Iran by the US and Israel in 2026.

Abundance of animation

Animation in the Che Guevara documentary is followed by a raft of animated movies in the official selection and parallel selections of Critics' Week and Directors' Fortnight.

Jim Green, by French animators Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athané, part of Midnight Screenings in the main festival, celebrates life on the margins of society through the story of the gay community in Paris. A virus shoots through the gay community, turning them into heterosexuals, leaving them with a fight to find a remedy to turn them back into homosexuals.

Animated film Jim Green, part of the Midnight Screenings, tells the story of the gay community in Paris facing a grave crisis (Photo: Cannes Film Festival)

There are three animated movies in the Directors' Fortnight programme, including the closing film, Vertiginous, by French musician-filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, about a man's big revelation to his friend: the entire human race is living in a simulation. Blaise is part of the ACID (Association for the Distribution of Independent Cinema) parallel selection at Cannes, and there is another animated film about two teenage revolutionaries out to change the world.

While Indian cinema is without a new feature film at the Cannes official selection this year, Nepal will make cinematic history with its first-ever feature film at the festival. Elephants in the Fog by Abinash Bikram Shah, part of the festival's Un Certain Regard category for fresh voices in world cinema, is in Nepali and Bhojpuri languages and tells the story of transgender women guarding a forest village from wild elephants. Shah's short film, Lori, incidentally, was the first Nepali film in the Cannes official selection in 2022.

The restored 1986 Malayalam film Amma Ariyan by John Abraham will be screened in the Cannes Classics section (Photo: Cannes Film Festival)

"Cinema is a living art. The selection will show new forms of filmmaking in 2026," says Cannes festival's Frémaux.

South Korean director Park Chan-wook is the president of the jury that will award the Palme d'Or this year. The other members of the jury include American actor Demi Moore and Kolkata-born Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty.

The Cannes festival runs from May 12 to 23.