Cannes 2026: Sound is the Fact

A Man of His Time (Emmanuel Marre, 2026)

Compared to vision, hearing may be closer to a certain kind of truth. One can close one’s eyes and interrupt visual input, but it is impossible to truly shut off hearing. Sound possesses an inherent invasiveness; it reaches the body before it reaches meaning.

In cinema, sound generally operates along two dimensions. The first is that of realism: dialogue, voice-over, and all diegetic sounds originating both inside and outside the frame that contribute to narrative construction. Off-screen sounds belong to this category because their purpose is to establish space and narrative continuity rather than dramatic exaggeration. The second dimension is that of fiction: musical scores and specially designed sound effects intended to guide audience emotion and attention. Of course, “realism” itself is often a carefully manufactured illusion. Parallel Tales by Farhadi from Cannes competition this year makes this explicit through its depiction of a sound designer at work. Footsteps, wind, and the collision of objects are largely recreated in post-production rather than captured on set. Yet for many filmmakers, these two dimensions are not clearly separated. Instead, they constantly overlap and infiltrate one another.

The Un Certain Regard Prize winner Everytime contains one of the festival’s most remarkable examples of audiovisual choreography. A panoramic point-of-view shot scans the distant skyline before settling on two young people standing atop a high-rise building. The camera begins a slow advance as the unseen observer murmurs to themselves. Suddenly, a bird enters the frame and interrupts the established logic of looking. The camera abandons its original subject and follows the bird’s trajectory until it witnesses an unexpected accident, whereupon it abruptly tilts downward toward the bushes below. At precisely this moment, ambient sounds begin to emerge. The subjective hearing associated with the observer gradually gives way to the acoustics of the surrounding space. Within a single shot, the image transitions from a subjective to an objective perspective. What drives this transformation is not cinematography but sound design.

Bruno Dumont’s Red Rocks, presented in Directors’ Fortnight, tells an adventure story set on the French Riviera through the eyes of a bunch of five-year-old children. Love, jealousy and violence intermingle within a small coastal town located barely twenty minutes from Cannes. An elevated railway cuts directly through the town, and Dumont repeatedly inserts the sound of passing trains into the soundtrack according to an almost musical rhythm. This is first and foremost a form of spatial realism, only secondarily a sonic structure. At times Dumont limits the soundtrack to only one or two elements—the train, an e-scooter, or the children’s four-wheel vehicles—achieving remarkable clarity through extreme simplicity. The director has acknowledged Jacques Tati as a key influence on this approach. Dumont is particularly fascinated by sounds that appear imperfect. The elastic rhythmic pulse created by wheels scraping against rails as a train approaches a station becomes part of the film’s atmosphere and internal rhythm, performing functions traditionally assigned to music. At the same time, whether in close-ups of the children or long shots of bodies diving into water, their voices remain consistently positioned close to the camera, constructing a strongly subjective auditory world filtered through childhood perception.

Red Rocks (Bruno Dumont, 2026)

Dumont almost entirely refuses the use of music in Red Rocks, allowing it to enter only during the ending credits. His resistance stems from a distrust of music used as a purely functional device. Yet looking across much of this year’s Cannes selection, musical scores were employed in precisely such a manner.

The Directors’ Fortnight animated feature We Are Aliens adopts an almost opportunistic approach to music. Classical compositions, light piano pieces, pop songs, electronic tracks, rock music and ambient textures are deployed in rapid succession. Whenever a scene requires a particular emotional tone, the film simply reaches for the corresponding musical equivalent. Another Directors’ Fortnight title, Atonement, focuses on American soldiers after the Iraq War. Its musical choices are even more awkward. The film uses the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations as transitional material, but in order to accommodate editing rhythms the music is abruptly cut apart and reassembled, creating the illusion of coherence while undermining the integrity of the composition itself. Nemes László's Moulin offers a more sophisticated example. During a Gestapo interrogation sequence, Nemes employs Offenbach’s famous Barcarolle from opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann. Elegant on the surface yet infused with latent menace, the music mirrors the Gestapo itself. Even Fatherland, widely praised for its integration of classical music, remains fundamentally functional in its use of music. The film concludes with Bach’s cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, specifically its most famous movement, Jesus bleibet meine Freude. The piece seeks to reconcile Thomas Mann, his son who died by suicide, and the daughter who remained by his side. Traditionally performed at a relatively brisk tempo in order to emphasize its sense of joy, the music here is rendered slowly on a deliberately imperfect organ. The result is a shift from transcendence toward melancholy. The score is recalibrated to align with the characters’ emotional states, transforming music into an instrument of psychological guidance.

Perhaps the most intriguing example comes from A Man of His Time, which received the award for Best Screenplay. Adapted from wartime letters written by director Emmanuel Marre’s great-grandfather, a technocrat under Vichy France, the film deliberately imitates the texture of 16mm film stock and adopts pseudo-documentary techniques to construct a sense of historical authenticity. Yet during one party sequence, the characters dance to some rock music while the genre itself was not yet invented. More specifically, they dance to Austrian rock band Opus’s 1984 hit “Live Is Life.” The effect is immediate. The historical realism so carefully cultivated elsewhere in the film suddenly collapses. There are only two possible explanations. Either the filmmaker possesses a surprisingly weak sensitivity to sound and has committed what amounts to an elementary historical error. Or, more interestingly, the anachronism is entirely deliberate. By introducing such an obvious dissonance, the film exposes its own fictionality and adopts an almost Brechtian strategy, reminding viewers that the “historical truth” they believe they are witnessing is itself a carefully manufactured illusion.