Cannes 2026 Opens 12 May with Park Chan-wook Presiding Over a Heavyweight Lineup

The 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival arrives with one of the strongest competition lineups of the past decade. The festival runs from 12 to 23 May 2026, opens with Pierre Salvadori's French period comedy *The Electric Kiss*, and is presided over by Park Chan-wook as president of the main competition jury.

The competition

From the 2,541 feature films submitted for consideration, festival director Thierry Frémaux assembled a competition that grew from an initial 21 to 22 films, drawn from three continents and including five works directed by women. The directors in competition include Asghar Farhadi, Pedro Almodóvar, Paweł Pawlikowski, Ira Sachs, Hirokazu Kore-eda, László Nemes, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Cristian Mungiu (with *Fjord*), and Almodóvar's *Bitter Christmas* — the only selected film with a world premiere predating the festival itself.

The mix is an auteur-driven lineup that reflects what Cannes does best: deep relationships with established directors, a curated selection of younger voices, and competition for the Palme d'Or that, by mid-festival, will produce its usual mix of consensus contenders and dark horses.

The jury

Park Chan-wook's jury panel is one of the festival's strongest in recent memory. Demi Moore, Stellan Skarsgård, Ruth Negga, Laura Wandel, Chloé Zhao, Diego Céspedes, Isaach De Bankolé and Paul Laverty round out a group that combines acting, directing and screenwriting backgrounds across continents. The composition signals seriousness: Cannes wants this lineup judged by people whose own work has been the kind of cinema the festival has historically championed.

The honorary awards

Two Honorary Palmes d'Or are being awarded this year — to Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director whose work has spanned independent horror through *The Lord of the Rings* trilogy and the more recent *Get Back* documentary, and to Barbra Streisand, the American actress, singer and filmmaker whose six-decade career remains one of the most consequential in American entertainment. Both awards are calibrated to recognise bodies of work that have not previously received Cannes' top honour.

The wider festival

Beyond the main competition, the festival's parallel sections — Un Certain Regard, Directors' Fortnight, Critics' Week — provide the venue's traditional showcase for emerging directors and films working outside the auteur-cinema mainstream. The festival's market, the Marché du Film, runs in parallel and remains one of the largest film-business events of the year.

Where 2026 fits

Cannes operates as a multi-purpose institution: artistic flagship, commercial market, cultural-policy moment, and international film-industry summit. Its 2026 edition arrives in a year when global cinema is in flux: Hollywood's content production is shifting under streaming-economics pressure; non-US cinema continues to grow in cultural reach; and the festival circuit's role in shaping awards-season trajectories has become more contested as the post-pandemic distribution landscape has settled.

The Palme d'Or will be awarded on 23 May. Whatever wins will become — for at least a year — the most discussed film outside Hollywood.