Cannes Film Festival 2026 lineup: Asghar Farhadi, Pedro Almodóvar, Ira Sachs and Hirokazu Kore-eda join an auteur-driven competition
According to the CinemaDrame news agency, this year’s Cannes Film Festival once again places strong emphasis on auteur cinema, with new films by Asghar Farhadi, Pedro Almodóvar, Paweł Pawlikowski, Ira Sachs, Hirokazu Kore-eda, László Nemes, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi set to screen in the festival’s main competition section.
Following the 2025 edition, which featured a strong Hollywood presence with titles such as Mission: Impossible – Final Account starring Tom Cruise and Top to Bottom by Spike Lee, this year’s festival will be dominated by international cinema and independent filmmakers. In fact, Ira Sachs is the only American director in the main competition, participating with The Man I Love, a musical fantasy starring Rami Malek that explores the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York.
Among the most star-studded competition entries is Fjord by Cristian Mungiu, his first English-language film, starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan as a couple who move to a remote town in Norway. Also included are Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War drama Fatherland starring Sandra Hüller; Hope by Na Hong-jin featuring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander (appearing as a married couple for the first time on screen); Asghar Farhadi’s Paris-set Parallel Tales starring Isabelle Huppert and Catherine Deneuve; and Rodrigo Sorving’s The Beloved, starring Javier Bardem as a famous filmmaker estranged from his daughter. Almodóvar also returns to Cannes with his Spanish tragicomedy Bitter Christmas, which has already received positive reviews in Spain.
At the start of the program announcement on Thursday, long-time Cannes director Thierry Frémaux said that “95 percent of the final lineup” had been revealed, with additional films to be finalized in the coming weeks. “Sometimes there are small delays in certain details, so we need a bit more time to complete the process, and final details will be confirmed next week or the week after,” he said.
Frémaux noted that 2,541 feature films were submitted for the official selection. “That is a thousand more than just 10 years ago. When I talk about dynamism, I also mean quantitative dynamism — with submissions from 141 countries, we are approaching Olympic-level scale — but the goal is for films to be shown where they can reach a global audience.”
Iris Knobloch, president of the Cannes Film Festival, also addressed global instability, saying that “the news coming from around the world is not encouraging” and that we are living in “a time of great uncertainty,” prompting some to ask, “what is the point of talking about cinema at all?”
However, she emphasized that Cannes itself was founded in 1939 during a period of crisis, and that “bringing together artists from around the world was not a luxury, but a necessity.” She added: “When the world loses balance, showcasing films from around the globe is not a simple gesture; it is a defense of humanity’s most valuable asset — freedom of thought.”
This year’s competition features a significant number of French-language films, including three directed by non-French filmmakers: Farhadi with Parallel Tales, Nemes with Moulin, and Hamaguchi with Suddenly. Emmanuel Mar presents Saving Us, a historical drama about Vichy France featuring Swann Arlaud from Anatomy of a Fall. Five films in competition are directed by women, including three French filmmakers: Léa Mysius with Night Tales, Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet with A Woman’s Life, and Jeanne Harry with Garance. Austria’s Marielle Heller presents Gentle Monster, and Germany’s Valeska Grisebach competes with Dream Adventure.
Asian cinema also has a strong presence this year, with four films from Japanese and Korean directors competing for the Palme d’Or. The most prominent is Hope by Na Hong-jin, his first feature in a decade and the first Korean film in the main competition in four years. Alongside Vikander and Fassbender, the cast includes Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Ha Hee-jung, and Taylor Russell. Hirokazu Kore-eda returns with Sheep in a Box, a near-future drama in which a couple adopts an advanced humanoid as their child. Ryusuke Hamaguchi competes with Suddenly, a French-language film starring Virginie Efira about a Paris nursing home director whose life is changed by a meeting with a sick Japanese playwright. Kōji Fukada also enters the main competition for the first time with Nagi’s Notebook.
A notable omission from the lineup is James Gray’s Paper Tiger, starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, and Miles Teller, which had previously been considered a strong contender and could have been the festival’s most star-studded entry. Although Frémaux did not mention it directly, he hinted that “there is a film you are thinking of, saying ‘ah, it’s not there!’ — but it will be, I tell you.”
Last month, Frémaux told Variety that studios are “producing fewer blockbusters and fewer auteur-driven projects than before,” emphasizing that the festival is “dependent on nothing but the films themselves.” He added that the reduced Hollywood presence does not signal a permanent trend, noting that “Tom Cruise and Paramount were here two years ago with Mission: Impossible and Top Gun.”
He also said that outside the studio system, independent cinema remains alive and well, and this year’s selection is proof of that.
In the “Un Certain Regard” section, several American films are included, such as Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, and Jordan Firstman’s debut feature Club Kid. Steven Soderbergh and Ron Howard will also present new documentaries in the festival’s special screenings section.
Elsewhere, Nicolas Winding Refn returns with His Private Hell, while Quentin Dupieux’s Fully Filly appears in the Midnight Screenings lineup.
As previously announced, the Cannes Film Festival will open on May 12 with Electric Kiss by Pierre Salvadori and will honor Barbra Streisand and Peter Jackson with honorary Palme d’Or awards.
