Films by Pedro Almodovar, Paweł Pawlikowski and Ryusuke Hamaguchi lead an auteur-heavy Cannes Film Festival lineup

Previous Palme d’Or winners will be represented

A number of former Palme winners are in the mix. That includes Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu’s Norway-set Fjord, starring the recently Oscar-nominated Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan. Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme in 2007.

Also returning is Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose 2018 drama Shoplifters won the Palme. He’ll debut the sci-fi Sheep in the Box, about a grieving couple in the near future who bring home a humanoid boy as their son.

The specialty distributor Neon has already boarded Fjord, Sheep in the Box and Sudden, giving it a chance to extend its historic record of six Palme winners in a row. Last year, the Neon release It Was Just an Accident, by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, won the Palme.

Neon is also behind an out of competition selection in Her Private Hell by Nicolas Winding Refn, the Drive filmmaker. A thriller starring Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, it’s Refn’s first feature film since 2016’s The Neon Demon.

The Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev is also back in the Cannes competition lineup with Minotaur. Zvyagintsev’s last two films, Loveless and Leviathan, both debuted at Cannes and went on to land Oscar nominations.

Other competition entries include films by Asghar Farhadi (Parallel Stories), Lukas Dhont (Coward) and Lazlo Nemes (Moulin).

Thierry Fremaux, Cannes’ artistic director, announced the selections in a news conference alongside festival president Iris Knobloch. Fremaux said that 2,541 feature films were submitted for inclusion.

“In this moment, bringing together films and artists from around the world is not a luxury, it’s a necessity,” Knobloch said. “Because when the world darkens, we lose our bearings. Showcasing films from all horizons is not a trivial act. It is defending what is most precious to humanity, its ability to dream and think freely.”

Cannes is coming off a 2025 festival that produced a number of Oscar contenders, including two best-picture nominees in Joachim Tier’s Sentimental Value and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. This year’s Cannes appears well positioned to continue the festival’s stature as the global launching pad of many of the year’s best international films, some of which are bound to show up at next year’s Oscars.

Hollywood studios are less present at Cannes this year

But Hollywood studios appear to be a no-show. Fremaux has said not to expect red carpet premieres like Top Gun: Maverick or Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning — both of which made splashy premieres in recent years. This year, Cannes announced ahead of the Paris news conference that John Travolta’s directorial debut Propeller One-Way Night Coach will debut in the Cannes Premiere section.

“The United States will be present, but the studios will be a bit less so,” Fremaux said. “It’s important to know that when studios are less present at Cannes, it means they are generally less present with the type of cinema that used to allow them to thrive.”

Two prominent American directors will debut documentaries in special screenings: Steven Soderbergh with John Lennon: The Last Interview and Ron Howard with Avedon, about the photographer Richard Avedon.

Opening the festival, out of competition, is the 1920s French film The Electric Kiss. Cannes requires its opening movie to release the same week in French cinemas. And entry to its prestigious competition lineup requires theatrical distribution, a stipulation that — given France’s laws guarding theatrical windows — has excluded Netflix movies and other streaming titles since 2017.

This year, the Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook will preside over the nine-member jury that will decide the Palme. And a pair of honorary Palmes will be handed out, to Barbra Streisand and to Peter Jackson.