Cannes 2026: Sex and Gender Politics

A Woman's Life (Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, 2026)

Sexual diversity has long become an undeniable reality of contemporary life. Yet a tension persists between this growing plurality and certain institutionalized forms of gender politics. The former privileges openness; the latter inevitably relies on the drawing of boundaries around identity.

In Cannes 2026, Jane Schoenbrun’s Un Certain Regard opener Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma articulates this tension almost immediately. Early in the film, its protagonist Kris (Hannah Einbinder) delivers a clear declaration of gender-political belief. Like Schoenbrun herself, Kris identifies as non-binary, and the certainty with which she expresses that identity recalls the institutional language spoken by child-protection officials in Palme d’Or winner Fjord by Cristian Mungiu. In both cases, non-binary identity and unconditional child protection are presented as self-evident progressive values, beyond dispute. Yet, as the films of Radu Jude and Mungiu repeatedly suggest, progressive discourse often possesses a dual nature. It functions simultaneously as a statement of values and as a label that can be attached or removed. Once such labels become fixed, they may quietly foreclose the possibility of dialogue.

These labels can be internalized. In A Woman’s Life, a surgeon gradually expands understanding of her own desires after meeting a female novelist. She remains attracted to a male subordinate and continues to rely on her husband as a source of emotional stability, yet after only a brief encounter with the novelist she rapidly develops an intimate attachment to her. The transition arrives so effortlessly that it feels less like the product of lived experience than the fulfillment of a conceptual design imposed from above. A similar mechanism appears in the Midnight Screenings. Species eroticizes both violence and the body. Initially attracted to a kind male neighbor, its protagonist later enters into a sexual relationship with a female rival after changes in her personality and circumstances. Sexual orientation here becomes a modular narrative component, capable of being rearranged. In Jeanne Herry’s Another Day, the heroine likewise moves quickly from a stable heterosexual relationship into a passionate emotional and sexual attachment with another woman.

The question raised by these films is whether diversity itself, once it becomes a recurring structural feature of contemporary Francophone cinema, has ceased to function as a description of experience and instead become an aesthetic norm—a marker of modernity that must be displayed. Standing in sharp contrast is Butterfly Jam, in which a same-sex sexual encounter emerges out of male rivalry and competition before leading to an accidental death. Rather than celebrating fluidity, the film reinscribes homosexuality within a violent structure of masculinity, as if driving backwards on the highway of contemporary gender politics.

Another approach seeks to loosen the grip of these identity frameworks altogether. In Nagi Notes, two same-sex couples exist within the story in an entirely ordinary manner. They are neither spectacularized nor positioned as the narrative’s central concern. Sexuality becomes simply one element among many within the everyday life of a small town suspended between historical memory and contemporary political realities. Here, sexual orientation is no longer a theme but merely a dimension of visibility.

The Black Ball (Javier Ambrossi & Javier Calvo, 2026)

The issue takes a different form in two competition films that engage directly with gender and sexuality through historical settings.

Lucas Dhont’s Coward unfolds during the First World War, following a group of military medics moving between battlefield trauma and life inside the barracks. Interwoven throughout are performance sequences marked by queer sensibilities, alongside the developing emotional relationship between Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia) and Francis (Valentin Campagne). The film clearly seeks to grant this relationship historical weight, and its elegant mise-en-scène reveals considerable ambition. Yet dramatically it tends toward depoliticization. Queerness is naturalized into an internally accepted form of emotional attachment, reducing the sense of oppression embedded within the historical context itself. The result is a film that places contemporary queer consciousness ahead of history, effectively using present-day gender politics to reconstruct a First World War military environment. By comparison, both Claire Denis’s Beau Travail and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain derive much of their emotional force from the external structures that constrain desire. In Coward, those structures often feel strangely absent, leaving the film suspended as a kind of historical romantic fantasy. Nevertheless, its two leads ultimately shared the festival’s Best Actor prize.

The Black Ball adopts a more complex strategy of historical collage. The film begins during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, where a soldier named Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) survives by falsely claiming allegiance to Franco’s Nationalists. In a military camp he meets the captured Republican soldier Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), and the two develop feelings for one another. The narrative then abruptly shifts back to 1932, where Carlos (Milo Quifes) faces discrimination because of his sexuality while his father attempts to discipline him through conventional ideals of masculinity. A further leap takes the story to 2017, where Alberto (Carlos González) continues negotiating these inherited forms of gendered experience through dating apps. The film’s ambition is to assemble a queer history across multiple temporalities. Its first third contains some of the festival’s most striking images and ideas. Yet the demands of converging three separate narrative strands eventually overwhelm the project. Forced to close the gaps between its timelines, the film repeatedly feeds the audience missing pieces of the puzzle, relying increasingly on explanatory gestures rather than discovery. By the conclusion, emotional music and overly symbolic set-pieces push the film toward sentimentality and excess. What begins as a structural exploration of queer history gradually transforms into an exercise in over-explanation, exchanging historical complexity for emotional catharsis.