11 discoveries from Cannes 2026

Winner of the Camera d’Or for Best First Feature Film, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s reckoning with the 1994 Rwandan genocide is a feat of cinematic wonder and community collaboration. A decade of research and the involvement of survivors, who deliver moving testimonies during group scenes, is threaded through a taut dramatic concept. Tutsi survivor Vénéranda (Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi) is a group leader at the Kibeho chapter of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, initiating dialogues between perpetrators and survivors. But when her teenage daughter falls pregnant by a Hutu man, grace is out of the question. Rich characteristisation, painterly cinematography and a profound understanding of the tricksy machinations of trauma drive this must-see debut feature. 

– Sophie Monks Kaufman

This animation from Cannes’s Acid sidebar was an unexpected treat, but then the festival’s smallest, public-facing sidebar is always good for a surprise or two. With a deadpan, oddball sensibility not dissimilar to their compatriot Quentin Dupieux (or even some of Wes Anderson’s more off-kilter work), filmmakers Dimitri Planchon and Jean-Paul Guigue share the overlapping stories of three family members who have never quite been able to fit in. The eponymous son pursues his love interest, a posh girl playing as a revolutionary as demonstrations rise around her house. The mother tries to win favour at work and stumbles into an unexpected lesbian relationship. The short-changed father, meanwhile, simply has an allergy to cotton wool and consequently embarrasses himself. All three end up in these unexpected situations out of social awkwardness and an inability to say no. It’s a strange one (not least thanks to the animation style, which uses the exaggerated features of real faces to initially off-putting effect), but a treat all the same.

– Thomas Flew

Starting with what appear to be the foreboding, murderous dreams of its protagonist, all set to an ominous Vittorio Giampietro score, Death Has No Master compels from the off. Like a far-out fictional cousin of Lucrecia Martel’s recent documentary Landmarks (2025), Jorge Thielen Armand’s third feature centres on land ownership in South America as a source of violent discontent. Asia Argento plays a bereaved Italian who travels to Venezuela to inherit her father’s cacao plantation, where she grew up, but finds his Afro-Venezuelan caretaker and her son claiming squatter’s rights. This swampy, slow-burn thriller is part-horror and part puzzle, tackling thorny issues of colonialism, race and family legitimacy in original and intriguing style.

– Lou Thomas

In a remote Nepalese village, Abinash Bikram Shah’s debut feature Elephants in the Fog tells the story of Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama), the matriarch of a house of Kinnar women, an ancient third-gender community. Sworn to celibacy, the women are both feared and respected for their magical powers. Pirati is considering leaving her life for love, but her daughter Joon (Sahab Din Miya), appalled by her betrayal, disappears into a forest, which is the literal stomping ground for a herd of elephants. A powerful, beautiful and rich film, Elephants in the Fog asserts the elusive magic of love and how it escapes all traditional confines.

– John Bleasdale

Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, which won top prize in Un Certain Regard, would be a coming-of-age romance if only its protagonist lived past the first act. And that’s no spoiler: her sudden death is practically a pre-credit sequence. The film then unspools like a fairytale gone wrong, all mood and omens, conjured by Gregory Oke’s mesmerising cinematography. The contours of young love, longing and maternal grief merge into the shape of a reality too painful to face head-on. And once the trio of mother, little sister and guilty boyfriend embark on a Tenerife holiday (yes, shades of Afterlife) nothing goes to plan: ocean tides and a magical child take over the story in remarkable and unforeseen ways.

– B. Ruby Rich

There is an uncanny magic to Maxence Voiseux’s Gabin, a documentary shot over 10 years, capturing the life of Gabin Jourdel, a young boy from the French farming region of Artois, from ages 8 to 18. There are no to-camera interviews, just gentle observation in the vein of Nicolas Philibert’s Être et avoir (2002). The changes in Gabin’s facial features, so beautifully captured in the fluid editing of Natali Barrey and Pascale Hannoyer, are the only real measure of time passing. There is a sadness to seeing this sensitive, emotionally intelligent boy become bruised by the world around him – kid Gabin lets his eyes fill with tears unguarded, but as we shift into his teens, he buries his face in his arm to conceal them. The 10-year conceit invites comparisons to Boyhood (2014), but there’s a different kind of intensity to witnessing a real-life coming-of-age, and a natural dramatic tension as Gabin grapples with whether to follow his mother’s path into cattle farming, or go out and forge his own.

– Katie McCabe

Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize, this feature debut by cinematographer Marine Atlan (Jessica Forever, The Rapture) has the metaphysical qualities of a myth and the emotional intensity of a Greek tragedy. For its young protagonists on a school trip, the highs and lows of teenhood are spun like a fever dream as the camera alternates between two classmates on the opposite sides of the popularity spectrum, the unruly Toni (Colas Quignard) and the introvert Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin). Atlan, who also shot the film, invites us to discover the psychogeography of Naples and the ruins of Pompeii, led by the ineffable desire to look down the crater of a volcano.

– Savina Petkova

Former Pixar animator Louis Clichy’s first solo feature as director exchanges the polished and exaggerated 3D Pixar style (productions he worked on included WALL-E and Up) for the delicate lyricism of a Chinese ink brush. Where a Pixar character’s emotions are eagerly telegraphed, 10-year-old Christophe’s horror at having to wear a cumbersome spine-correcting metal corset is expressed through minimal mark-making as his face comprises just a few black lines. Wispy brushstrokes also sketch a horizon of fields, capturing the simple beauty of the family farmlands under threat from 1980s agricultural changes, and adding a mournful mood. The farm feels like it’s fading away before our eyes. But most of all, Clichy’s drawing wonderfully captures Christophe’s physical and psychological state. As he stumbles or as his fury takes over, the horizon line tilts and the world hurtles into abstraction.

– Isabel Stevens

The title of Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s fiction debut gestures to his former professor James Benning. Its promise of a structuralist tour of Buddhist temples in the suburbs of Bangkok, however, quickly gives way to a profoundly emotional narrative. By the time the characters – a family crammed in a car and a minivan – have made the third or fourth stop in their merit-making pilgrimage, following the death of the patriarch, the count gets lost altogether. The specificities of Thai culture and the universality of family dynamics fluidly come together, turning a journey that spans but a few diegetic hours into a philosophical odyssey.  

– Giovanni Marchini Camia

That Propeller One-Way Night Coach is the directorial debut of John Travolta was enough to  attract the curious to a one-time-only screening at Cannes that turned into an honorary Palme d’Or unveiling. But then it turned out to be a sweet, delightfully eccentric film: an earnest, Mad Men-colourful, charming adaptation of Travolta’s own same-titled children’s book about a cross-country plane trip by a boy (modelled on Travolta’s tot self) and his flamboyant mother. What tips the film over into discovery territory is Travolta’s pages and pages of descriptive, often amusing voiceover, giving his passion project its own oddball, Proust-for-kids flair. Fasten your seatbelts!

– Nicolas Rapold

An Iranian father’s scrappy prison escape short film, an uncle’s witty and weary audio testimonies from a historic student protest, 2000s-era cell phone footage capturing the massive unrest in Tehran following a rigged election – spanning 50 years, Pegah Ahangarani’s memoir documentary draws on an incredible arsenal of archive material. It explores her family’s personal and multifaceted perspective on almost half a century of protest and revolution in Iran, from before the Iran-Iraq War until the war with Israel and the US in 2026. Ahangarani’s film is both confessional and granular, finding thoughtful ways to mirror her family’s collective experience of political optimism and disillusionment. It’s gripping and revelatory.

– Rory Doherty