Cannes Film Festival: Asghar Farhadi, Pedro Almodóvar, Hirokazu Kore-eda & Ira Sachs Among Filmmakers Set For Competition As Full Lineup Revealed

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival lineup was announced Thursday morning, and among the headline filmmakers set to debut new works are previous Palme d’Or winners Cristian Mungiu and Hirokazu Kore-eda, as well as two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi and veteran American indie director Ira Sachs.

It’s an auteur-laden Competition lineup with a distinctly international and French flavour. A full 65% of the Competition films herald from France, Japan and Spain. There’s only one U.S. film in Competition: Sachs’ The Man I Love. As we have reported in recent months, this is a Cannes edition that will be light on U.S. studio presence, and there are no studio blockbusters.

Sachs’ The Man I Love, a feature set in 1980s New York, has been described as a “musical fantasia of a city under duress.” This morning, Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux said the film deals with the AIDS crisis. Sachs wrote the screenplay with Mauricio Zacharias. Starring are Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford, Rebecca Hall and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.

Farhadi will debut Parallel Stories, a feature he shot in Paris last year. The film is yet to receive an official synopsis but the cast features Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney and Adam Bessa. Parallel Tales is the Oscar-winning Iranian director’s first feature since A Hero, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2021. The film also marks Farhadi’s second French-language outing after The Past with Tahar Rahim and Bérénice Bejo, who won the Best Actress award for her performance at Cannes in 2013.

Japan is well represented in the Competition with three movies, including Koreeda’s Sheep in the Box, which is said to deal with AI, while there’s also starry Korean movie Hope with Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Hoyeon and Taylor Russell among the cast. Meanwhile, Palme d’Or whisperer Neon, which has had the last six main prize winners, returns to Competition with Mungiu’s Fjord, which stars Sebastian Stan and Sentimental Value actress Renate Reinsve.

There’s a large Spanish contingent on the Croisette this year, with two-time Oscar winner Pedro Almodóvar screening his latest Bitter Christmas in Competition. The film has already had a theatrical run in the filmmaker’s native Spain. Almodóvar’s previous collaborators, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, also return to Cannes this year with separate projects. Bardem stars in The Beloved by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, and Cruz has what Frémaux described as a memorable cameo in La Bola Negra by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. Both of those films are in Competition.

Overall, five women are debuting films in Competition. The festival record for women filmmakers in competition is seven, set in 2023, the year Justine Triet won the Palme with Anatomy of a Fall. Frémaux also noted this year that 2,541 feature films were submitted for official selection. “That’s 1,000 more than just 10 years ago,” he said. Cannes remains as in-demand as ever, even if this year the U.S. studios have not committed any big guns to the Riviera.

Among anticipated films not mentioned by Frémaux this morning were Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard and James Gray’s Paper Tiger. The festival chief did say that at least one more film was being readied and should be added to the Competition. Another largely missing element from the lineup was Middle East and North African cinema, which is usually well represented in Cannes. Both festival president Iris Knobloch and artistic director Frémaux made reference to ongoing global conflicts, and it’s possible that there has been a knock-on effect.

Elsewhere in the lineup, the buzzy American filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun returns with a new feature titled Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Schoenbrun’s latest is among the more talked-about indie festival titles of the year, following the success of the filmmaker’s 2024 film I Saw the TV Glow. Plan B has produced Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which will open the Un Certain Regard section. The film stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.

There are also some heavy hitters outside of the festival’s competition strands. Nicolas Winding Refn returns with Her Private Hell, Steven Soderbergh will screen John Lennon: The Last Interview, and Ron Howard will debut documentary Avedon.

There should be no shortage of stars in attendance, as usual. Andy Garcia-directed Out of Competition feature Diamond could see a Croisette appearance for actors Brendan Fraser, Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman; Karma, by Guillaume Canet, stars Marion Cotillard; and Quentin Dupieux’s Full Phil stars Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson. Lea Seydoux, Isabelle Huppert, Catherine Deneuve and Monica Bellucci are among other cinema luminaries starring in films at the festival, while Sandra Hüller returns with Competition film Fatherland. Former Manchester United soccer star Eric Cantona is the subject of a new documentary and stars in a narrative movie in the lineup.

Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss (La Vénus électrique) is the festival’s opening title. Set against the backdrop of the early 20th-century Paris art world, the period drama stars Pio Marmaï, Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche and Vimala Pons.

John Travolta‘s directorial debut, Propeller One-Way, will also screen at the festival before its May 29 launch on Apple TV.

The under-the-radar Apple Original Films project is inspired by the 1997 kids’ book of the same name that Travolta wrote for his son. The mid-length film, whose cast includes his daughter Ella Bleu Travolta, charts a nostalgic journey set in the golden age of aviation: “Young airplane enthusiast Jeff (played by newcomer Clark Shotwell) and his mother (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) set off on a one-way cross-country odyssey to Hollywood, which transforms a simple flight into the trip of a lifetime. Between airline meals, charming flight attendants (played by Ella Bleu Travolta and Olga Hoffmann), unexpected stopovers, larger-than-life passengers, and a thrilling glimpse at first class, the journey unfolds in moments both magical and unexpected, charting the course for the boy’s future.”

Propeller One-Way will play in the festival’s Premiere Selection in the Debussy Theater at the Palais des Festivals, with Travolta in attendance.

Cannes runs May 12-23.

See the full lineup below:

Competition

Minotaur, Andrey Zvyagintsev

The Beloved, Rodrigo Sorogoyen

The Man I Love, Ira Sachs

Fatherland, Pawel Pawlikowski

Moulin, Lazlo Nemes

Histoires de la Nuit, Lea Mysius

Fjiord, Cristian Mungiu

Notre Salut, Emmanuel Marre

Gentle Monster, Marie Kreutzer

Hope, Na Hong-Jin

Nagi Notes, Kôji Fukada

Sheep in the Box, Hirokazu Kore-eda

Garance, Jeanne Herry

The Unknown, Arthur Harari

Sudden, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

The Dreamed Adventure, Valeska Grisebach

Coward, Lukas Dhont

La Bola Negra, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi

Parallel Stories, Asghar Farhadi

Bitter Christmas, Pedro Almodóvar

A Woman’s Life, Charline Bourgeois-Taquet

Un Certain Regard

All the Lovers in the Night by Yukiko Sode

La más dulce, Laïla Marrakchi

Club Kid, Jordan Firstman

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun

Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep, Rakan Mayasi

Everytime, Sandra Wollner

Meltdown, Manuela Martelli

I’ll Be Gone in June, Katharina Rivilis

I Am Always Your Maternal Animal, Valentina Maurel

Congo Boy, Rafiki Fariala

Iron Boy, Louis Clichy

Benimana, Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo

Elephants in the Fog, Abinash Bikram Shah

Uļa, Viesturs Kairišs

Words of Love, Rudi Rosenberg

Out of Competition

Her Private Hell, Nicolas Winding Refn

Diamond, Andy Garcia

The Electric Kiss, Pierre Salvadori

La Bataille de Gaulle : L’age de fer, Antonin Baudry

Karma, Guillaume Canet

L’Objet Du Delit, Agnes Jaoui

L’abandon, Vincent Garenq

Cannes Premiere

Propeller One-Way, John Travolta

The Samurai and the Prisoner, Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Heimsuchung, Volker Schlondorff

El partido, Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco

When the Night Falls by Daniel Auteuil

Special Screenings

John Lennon: The Last Interview, Steven Soderbergh

Avedon, Ron Howard

Les Survivants du Che, Christophe Réveille

Les Matins  Merveilleux – Avril Besson

Cantona, Ben Nicholas and David Tryhorn

L’affaire Marie-Claire, Yvo Muller, Lauriane Escaffre

Rehearsals for a Revolution, Pegah Ahangarani

Midnight Screenings

Roma elastica, Bertrand Mandico

Jim Queen, Nicolas Athane and Marco Nguyen

Full Phil, Quentin Dupieux

Colony, Yeon Sang-ho

Sanguine, Marion Le Coroller

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