Indie films race for Cannes top prize with big studios absent

CANNES, France — Tales of war, grief, and artificial intelligence join a race for the 2026 s top prize starting from Tuesday, in a contest left wide open by the absence of big studio contenders and other clear front-runners.

The glitzy festival, long a launch pad for Hollywood franchises such as Indiana Jones and Top Gun, will not host any blockbusters this year, nor the large-scale red carpet rollouts that typically accompany them, as riskaverse studios grow more cautious.

There will still be plenty of big names on show — among them Barbra Streisand, winning a lifetime achievement award, and John Travolta, making his directorial debut.

“As long as the weather holds out, I think it’s going to be a glamorous Cannes. Cannes does it better than anyone else,” Scott Roxborough, European correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter, told Reuters on Monday.

FIELD IS OPEN AMONG 22 COMPETITORS
There are 22 films in competition for the Palme d’Or prize awarded at the closing ceremony on May 23, with independent cinema heavyweights including Pedro Almodovar and Laszlo Nemes.

“There’s no one or two films that everybody has been waiting for that everybody’s excited to see, which in some ways makes it more interesting because it makes it a real open field,” said Mr. Roxborough.

Iran’s Asghar Farhadi and Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi of Drive My Car fame both have French-language family dramas: Parallel Tales, with Isabelle Huppert as a nosy neighbor, and All Of a Sudden, about elderly care, respectively.

From the US, Paper Tiger, directed by James Gray, will bring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver back together after 2019’s Marriage Story, while Rami Malek stars in a drama about HIV/AIDS in 1980s New York City in Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love.

Two past winners — Romania’s Cristian Mungiu and Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda — are vying for a second Palme d’Or.

Mr. Kore-eda, who won with Shoplifters in 2018, will explore grief and artificial intelligence in Sheep In The Box.

Mr. Mungiu returns with Fjord, a family drama set in a remote Norwegian village starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan. For the Romanian director, selection alone was already a prize.

“This selection is the best reward we could get for our efforts since Cannes is the place in the world where cinema is the most respected,” Mr. Mungiu wrote on Instagram.

POLITICS PRESENT BUT CINEMA IN FOCUS
Politics are present in this year’s selections, but often through historical lenses, Mr. Roxborough said, citing Lukas Dhont’s Coward, a World War Oneera drama about soldiers, and Nemes’ Moulin, which centers on the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France.

A Man Of His Time, by French director Emmanuel Marre, is also set in Vichy France.

“It’s very difficult for people to make definitive statements that aren’t going to be immediately taken over by events,” he said, adding that festival organizers remain keen to keep the focus firmly on cinema.

That emphasis is echoed in the opening film, Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss, a romantic comedy set in interwar Paris.

“In my own way, I try to offer a form of poetry or beauty,” Mr. Salvadori told Reuters, describing the film as “an ode to fiction” and to cinema itself.

Reflecting broader industry shifts, influencers from YouTube and other social media platforms will attend a parallel creator economy event at the film market, while leading names from the fashion world will again be prominent around the Croisette. — Reuters