Polemics, female trouble and dreams of slow cinema at the festival’s 78th edition
There are two ways you can read the computer-generated pre-roll that plays before every official Competition screening at Cannes, according to Filmmaker Magazine’s Vadim Rizov. The clip – which depicts a watery ascent up a series of red-carpeted stairs, to a star-studded night sky – was originally made for the 44th edition of the festival. On the occasion of certain anniversaries, the names of directors are added to each stair; most years they remain blank, and the graphic regularly plays to applause regardless. “If you’re feeling uncharitable, this can serve as a damning metaphor for the festival itself: an image created in 1991 synecdochally standing for a selection of bedrock auteurs that remain stuck in the same time period,” Rizov writes. “If you’re feeling charitable, the metaphor is more positive: the future of Cannes is unwritten, and the best is yet to come.”
Two things can be true at once. But in 2025, the festival’s programming tendencies come across a little haphazard. In trying to strike a precise balance between auteur loyalty, arthouse prestige, commercial viability and starpower, the lineup ends up optimised for Western celebrity more than anything else – movies that might spawn memes, lead to clout on Letterboxd or, perhaps most pertinently, result in lots of boutique merchandise sales.
That doesn’t mean that’s all there is. If Cannes is good for one thing, it’s pulse-checking the health of arthouse collaborations around the world. Admittedly, the mood is a little low, and the market a little soft: the prospect of a nonsensical tariff on ‘foreign-made’ productions connected to American filmmakers and studios is not only “outright ridiculous”, as Leonardo Goi explains in Notebook, it’s “hopelessly out of touch with the way the industry actually functions,” because many contemporary titles result from pooling different countries’ resources and incentives.
Óliver Laxe’s Jury Prize-winning Sirât is one such co-production: the result of a €1.2 million Spanish production grant to a French-born Galician director, who has made a muse of the arid Moroccan setting he’s now shot three films in. Also meaning ‘path’ or ‘way’ in Arabic, the Sîrat of the title refers to a concept in Islamic eschatology: a bridge to heaven whose length spans the chasm of hell. I won’t spoil much of this transcendental road movie – which begins in the desert with a missing person and a freewheeling techno rave – but I will say that it is a divisive drama that I was surprised to love. I never felt betrayed by its excruciating plot machinations, but sympathise if you do.
It’s a brutal movie about a brutal world – a thematic conceit seemingly applicable to much of this year’s programme. For Spike Magazine, Nolan Kelly summarises an emergent “globalised pessimism” through a few repeating motifs. Calling to mind instances in Wes Anderson’s Phoenician Scheme (a darker, arguably weaker outing in the context of the director’s oeuvre, but an amusing enough showcase, especially for fans of Michael Cera), Julia Ducournau’s Alpha (an unrelentingly bleak pandemic narrative that’s strongest when it sticks with its adolescent protagonist) and others, Kelly notes “family members plotting to kill one another; children living through the death knell of authoritarian states […] an obsession with AIDS and other forms of blood purity.”
If I can make an addition to this list, it would be the films of a category dedicated to various shades of female pain – one which I have dubbed the woman-spinning-out subgenre. The trauma plot is most apparent (and least bearable) in Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, an imagistically poetic adaptation of a memoir by Oregonian writer Lidia Yuknavitch that ultimately comes across too on-the-nose to be successful. On an episode of the Film Comment podcast, Devika Girish discusses how Yuknavitch’s somatic writing reflects an earlier era of feminist discourse, and why its impulses come across as dated in Stewart’s film. “There’ll be a scene where she’s trying to come to terms with her body, and the narration is: I’m staring at my wide, wet cunt.”
Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, also adapted from a book of the same name, faces similar charges. (Girish: “I thought to myself, hysteria is so back.”) But I found a lot to admire in this wild, weird swing with Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson doing career-best work as Grace and Jackson, a young couple who move into a ramshackle country home together and have their first child. Ramsay’s frightfully alive film has a decidedly vintage sonic identity, with needle drops by Bowie, Billie Holiday, Cream, Liz Brady, Jean Sablon; the director herself taking a curtain call to sing the sombre Joy Division cover that plays over the credits. You’ll never listen to Toni Basil’s “Mickey” the same way again.
A less hysterical but still enjoyable entry into the woman-spinning-out pantheon is Anna Cazenave Cambet’s Love Me Tender. Yet another literary adaptation from a book of the same name, the film stars Vicky Krieps as Clémence, the protagonist of an autofictional novel by celebrated lesbian author Constance Debré. The book chronicles Debré’s fight to maintain joint custody of her son, but it is as much about the writer embracing the alternative joys of her life as a creative, queer person as the abusive hurdles she faces at the hands of her vindictive ex-husband, who weaponises his homophobia through the French legal system.
Between an opening ceremony where Robert DeNiro denounced “America’s philistine president”, the new internal guidelines sent to staffers to help them maintain “political neutrality” in both private and public interactions, and the region-wide power cut that turned out to be anarchist sabotage, it felt like an especially political year for the festival. As presaged by this auspicious Mark Asch tweet, Juliette Binoche’s jury gave the top prize to Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, a well-deserved win for a bracing, humorous film that had to be shot in secret. Following a man who believes he might have identified his former torturer, the film comes as a kind of catharsis following a period in the Iranian director’s life marked by imprisonment and legal struggles following his conviction by the regime for propaganda against the Islamic Republic, including bans that prohibited him making films or travelling overseas.
As with every global-facing cultural event this year, the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza loomed large over the proceedings. An open letter addressing the relative silence and complicity of the entertainment industry – that has, by and large, resisted condemning the war waged by Israel and its enabling allies – was signed by over 350 film workers, and published in Libération on the first day of the festival. The letter (available in English here) is a tribute to Fatma Hassouna, a 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist. Along with six members of her family, Hassouna was killed by airstrike shortly after Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk – the documentary she starred in and helped director Sepideh Farsi make, about the mundane atrocities of life under siege – was announced to premiere in Cannes ACID, the most fledgling of the festival’s sidebar sections.
Hassouna’s own photography of Gazans provides some of the most affecting images in the film, which primarily takes place as a series of patchy FaceTime calls between her and Farsi. Pietro Bianchi locates these frustrating scenes in Laura Marks’ definition of the glitch, which serves as a reminder that the digital stems from the analogue roots of electrons, presenting “a surge of the disorderly world into the orderly transmission of electronic signals”.
The losing side in a conflict like this can only really be communicated in these periphrastic terms. “Gaza’s images are destined to remain hors-champ,” Bianchi writes, “because their erasure – whether through forced invisibility or manipulation – is itself part of the war strategy.” In the wake of Hassouna’s assassination, Farsi’s film feels vital as a document of the journalist’s legacy, but it ultimately tells us little more than one learns watching the news. I think Sophie Monks Kaufman is right to ask whether making this film and sending it to the festival was worth its fatal cost: “The dramatic irony feels tasteless and cruel. We know that she will only come to Cannes as a still image behind the dates 1999-2025.” Despite the film’s merits, it feels so deeply wrong to have it and not the subject who animated it, who gave it a soul.
Documentaries tend to get short shrift at Cannes, where festival chief Thierry Frémaux recently admitted they are “a minority”. Only two non-fiction films have ever won the Palme D’Or since documentaries are rarely, if ever programmed in the Competition section. But the l’Oeil d’Or award – introduced just ten years ago – is dedicated to the festival’s top documentary. For its decennial, a Special Jury Prize was awarded to Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man, an account of the WikiLeaks movement and the destructive surveillance Julian Assange was subjected to as its founding publisher. The film is a persuasive overview of Assange’s political woes, but avoids probing the complexities of his character, skimming over sexual assault allegations and ethical questions that arise when publishing sensitive information.
For me, the strongest films at Cannes this year luxuriated in taking their time. There was The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt’s slow implosion of an art heist in a Massachusetts suburb. Bi Gan’s 160-minute Resurrection was a late addition to the Competition lineup that premiered to press close to midnight on a Thursday, repelling and enthralling viewers at roughly the same rate. Perhaps the most compelling feature I had the pleasure of taking in this year was Lav Diaz’s Magellan, an exceptionally-crafted period epic that deconstructs the mythos and colonial sensationalism of the conquistador’s exploits. Led by Gael García Bernal, Diaz’s deeply evocative film runs for 156 minutes, making it one of the auteur’s shortest, as well as being the first he shot in colour in over a decade. You can see why – unfolding at the pace of a blossom on a lake, Magellan is as rigorous in its aesthetic dedication to the humid beauty of the Philippines as it is in the perspectives of its Indigenous people, eschewing the dramatics of battle for something graver and more mercurial.
As the industry moves further towards privileging content over form and classifiable genre over artistic complexity, the market niche representing the festival film stands to lose some legitimacy. Don’t expect to read all about it, though – with platform capitalism and proprietary distribution controlling a system like Cannes’, media sycophancy is a heightened and encouraged aspect of the architecture. Journalists should really just be grateful to be present and accredited, lest they want to risk having their exclusive invite revoked. It is also measurably harder (both physically and morally) to slate a film while hungover from its afterparty open bar. In this vein, Jordan Cronk observes “a series of self-fulfilling events” in which “critics are so invested in seeing that they can’t boo the film when it ends because they already applauded A24’s logo when it began.”
In the haze of habitual movie-watching, I sometimes find myself on autopilot, half-awake and clapping along too. But when a film really reaches out and grabs you, it’s an undeniable feeling – a subgenre, at the very least, of falling in love. It’s this romance that keeps critics coming back, year after year, to the Côte d’Azur: a gaudy, resplendent mirage of a place that always seems to prove it can still touch and surprise.
