Cannes 2026: Away from Home

Fjord (Cristian Mungiu, 2026)

Cannes may be an international film festival, but French production remains one of its structural pillars. Throughout the festival, aside from the official Cannes opener and the newly introduced Directors’ Fortnight opening sequence, the logos that appeared most frequently on screen were those of Canal+, france tv, and the CNC (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée). Together, they point to a simple reality: Cannes continues to depend heavily on the financing and distribution mechanisms of the French film industry.

One of the most widely discussed off-screen developments this year occurred just before the festival opened, when hundreds of French film professionals—including Juliette Binoche—signed an open letter criticizing media tycoon Vincent Bolloré, whose Canal+ empire has increasingly aligned itself with far-right political positions while expanding its influence over France’s media and cultural sectors. Canal+ executives subsequently indicated that future collaborations with the signatories would be unlikely, provoking an even stronger backlash within the French film community. During the festival, boos frequently greeted the Canal+ logo before screenings, a visible expression of that discontent.

At the same time, French financing continues to support filmmakers from outside France, incorporating their works into a distribution network largely oriented toward the festival circuit. This has long been one of the defining characteristics of the French film industry. This year’s selection across multiple sections offered particularly clear examples of directors from Eastern Europe and the Middle East choosing to make films within Western European cultural contexts.

Diary of a Chambermaid (Radu Jude, 2026)

Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, who speaks fluent French, returned to Directors’ Fortnight with Diary of a Chambermaid. Adapted from Octave Mirbeau’s novel—previously filmed by Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel and Benoît Jacquot—Jude's version functions less as a direct adaptation than as a variation on an established text. The film follows Gianina (Ana Dumitrașcu), a Romanian woman working as a maid for a upper-class family in Bordeaux while simultaneously participating in an amateur theatrical production of Diary of a Chambermaid. In front of her employers, she speaks French and performs the role expected of her: restrained, obedient and diligent. During video calls with her mother and daughter back in Romania, however, she switches languages and becomes far sharper, more combative and emotionally exposed. The film combines Jude’s characteristic humor and irreverence with a portrait of migrant-family fragmentation. One of its most heartbreaking images arrives when Gianina’s daughter, communicating through a screen, watches her absent mother perform acts of care for another family’s child. Jude uses comedy to tell a profoundly sad story. The result functions as a contemporary fable, suggesting that the class and labor relations depicted by Mirbeau have not disappeared but merely evolved into more globalized and everyday forms.

Jude’s compatriot Cristian Mungiu won this year’s Palme d’Or with Fjord, another transnational production. In some respects, the film can be read as a continuation of his 2022 feature R.M.N.. The themes of xenophobia and social conflict have simply migrated from a Romanian village to the Norwegian fjords. Opening with the Christian hymn “Amazing Grace,” the film follows a Romanian-Norwegian family that relocates to a remote fjord community only to find itself increasingly scrutinized by both neighbors and state institutions. When bruises are discovered on one of the children, schools and welfare authorities intervene, quickly transforming a family already struggling with cultural and religious differences into suspected abusers. Mungiu does not position himself squarely between both sides of the dispute. Instead, he leans slightly toward the parents’ perspective and, by extension, toward the traditional value structures associated with “home,” aka Romania. Several scenes convey this through pointed irony. When child-protection officials first visit the mother Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), the conversation is framed through a window that separates interior from exterior space. Outside, a Norwegian flag flutters continuously in the cold wind, visually embodying the stability and legitimacy of institutional authority. Yet the film simultaneously suggests that this authority is built upon assumptions that remain unverified, with preventive intervention reshaping the family before wrongdoing has been established. Later, after all five children have been removed and placed in foster care, the parents are required to attend educational programs promoting officially sanctioned progressive values. Most participants in these sessions appear to be immigrants rather than ethnic Norwegians, a distribution that reinforces the cultural asymmetries embedded within the system itself. Only after the father, Mihai (Sebastian Stan), achieves a partial legal victory, the film shifts toward a critique of religion and homeland. His success is quickly appropriated by churches and diplomatic institutions, transformed into symbolic capital for conservative values.

This is where Mungiu and Jude ultimately converge. Neither filmmaker places unquestioning faith in the rhetoric of progress. Instead, both remain alert to the possibility that contemporary institutions may conceal old hierarchies beneath newly polished surfaces.

Minotaur (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2026)

The Grand Prix winner Minotaur marks Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s first feature since relocating to France. Though shot in Russian and directly concerned with life after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the film was largely photographed in Latvia, whose landscapes and urban environments closely resemble those of Russia. The story follows Gleb (Dmitry Mazurov), a private businessman whose company faces compulsory military mobilization just as he discovers his wife’s affair. Personal collapse and state coercion become inseparable, drawing him into a crisis where family relationships and political structures intertwine. Gradually, through passivity and compromise, he becomes part of the very system that threatens him. The narrative consequently evolves into a psychological thriller infused with political allegory. The approach is characteristic of Zvyagintsev. Since The Return, he has repeatedly placed individual characters within larger symbolic frameworks, using nested layers of family, morality and institutions to dissect the mechanisms of power underlying Russian society. Yet this is also what keeps Minotaur just short of greatness. Its characters often seem to operate within conceptual structures rather than transcend them, remaining subservient to the ideas they are meant to embody.

If these three transnational productions remain, in one way or another, concerned with questions of homeland, Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales moves closer to complete self-deterritorialization. Inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love from the Decalogue series—and featuring music by Kieślowski’s longtime collaborator Zbigniew Preisner—the film relocates its entire narrative to Paris, shedding almost all traces of an Iranian cultural context. It centers on a novelist suffering from writer’s block who begins observing a neighbor through a telescope and transforming those observations into literary material. At the same time, a young man she hires gradually enters her life, causing the boundaries between fiction and reality to collapse. Writing and lived experience begin to interfere with one another in unexpected ways. Farhadi has never pursued overt political expression in the manner of fellow Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi or Mohammad Rasoulof who triumphed in the previous two editions. Yet after leaving Iran, his tendency toward abstraction has intensified. Increasingly detached from specific cultural contexts, his recent work follows a form of decontextualized French realism. The danger is that he risks becoming a director valued primarily for technical competence—a skilled craftsman available to service narratives rather than an auteur anchored in a distinctive world of his own.