Cannes 2026 Official Selection: Complete Breakdown of the 79th Edition Lineup

Cannes 2026 Lineup Announced at Pathé Palace

The 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will run May 12-23, 2026. Festival President Iris Knobloch and General Delegate Thierry Frémaux unveiled the Official Selection on April 9, 2026 at the Pathé Palace in Paris. Frémaux disclosed that 2,541 feature films from 141 countries were submitted — "1,000 more than just 10 years ago" — calling the volume "Olympic-level."

South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Decision to Leave) presides over the main competition jury. Actress Eye Haïdara hosts the opening and closing ceremonies. Two Honorary Palmes d'Or will be awarded during the festival: to Peter Jackson and Barbra Streisand.

Key Data

1. 79th Cannes Film Festival: May 12-23, 2026. Opening film is Pierre Salvadori's French period comedy The Electric Kiss (Venus Electrificata).
2. 21 films selected in main competition, drawn from three continents, with five female directors — Jeanne Herry, Léa Mysius, Valeska Grisebach, Marie Kreutzer, and Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet.
3. Pedro Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad) is the only competition title with a pre-festival world premiere, having been released in Spain before Cannes.
4. Thierry Frémaux confirmed James Gray's Paper Tiger is a potential late addition to the competition lineup.
5. Park Chan-wook leads the main competition jury, continuing Cannes' pattern of auteur jury leadership (following Greta Gerwig in 2024 and Juliette Binoche in 2025).

The Competition (21 Films)

Headline auteur returns dominate: Pedro Almodóvar (Bitter Christmas), Asghar Farhadi (Parallel Tales), Paweł Pawlikowski (Fatherland), Ira Sachs (The Man I Love), Hirokazu Kore-eda (Sheep in the Box), Ryusuke Hamaguchi (All of a Sudden), László Nemes (Moulin), Cristian Mungiu (Fjord), Andrey Zvyagintsev (Minotaur), Rodrigo Sorogoyen (The Beloved), and Na Hong-jin (Hope — his first feature in nine years).

New or less-festival-anchored voices round out the field: Jeanne Herry, Léa Mysius, Javier Ambrossi & Javier Calvo (The Black Ball), Lukas Dhont (Coward), Valeska Grisebach, Marie Kreutzer, Emmanuel Marre, Koji Fukada, Arthur Harari, and Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet.

Out of Competition & Midnight Screenings

Six Out of Competition titles include Agnès Jaoui's Crescendo, Antonin Baudry's De Gaulle: Tilting Iron, Andy Garcia's Diamond, Nicolas Winding Refn's Her Private Hell, Pierre Salvadori's opener, and Guillaume Canet's Karma.

Midnight Screenings draws Yeon Sang-ho (Colony), Quentin Dupieux (Full Phil), Bertrand Mandico (Roma Elastica), and two Caméra d'Or-eligible debuts.

Un Certain Regard (15 Films)

Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens the section — a slasher positioning that marks one of the most commercially ambitious UCR openers in years. Other notable UCR entries: Sandra Wollner's Everytime, Manuela Martelli's The Meltdown, Laïla Marrakchi's Strawberries, and Jordan Firstman's debut Club Kid.

Cannes Premiere & Special Screenings

The Cannes Premiere section features Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kokurojo: The Samurai and the Prisoner, John Travolta's directorial debut Propeller One-Way Night Coach, Daniel Auteuil's When the Night Falls, and Volker Schlöndorff's Visitation.

Special Screenings includes Ron Howard's Avedon and Steven Soderbergh's John Lennon: The Last Interview, reinforcing the trend of major American directors deploying documentary features at Cannes.

Pattern Context

The 2026 lineup skews heavily toward established auteurs with Palme d'Or or Academy Award pedigrees: Pawlikowski, Farhadi, Kore-eda, Hamaguchi, Nemes, Mungiu, and Zvyagintsev collectively hold eight Cannes main-section top prizes and four Academy Awards for Best International Feature between them.

The selection also reflects Cannes' increasing willingness to programme U.S. independent cinema in the Un Certain Regard section (Schoenbrun, Firstman) rather than the main competition — creating a two-track American presence where Ira Sachs represents the commercial-adjacent indie and Schoenbrun the vanguard.

The Paper Tiger tease from Frémaux signals that the festival retains flexibility to add high-profile titles post-announcement — a tactic used in prior years for Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and Coppola's Megalopolis (2024).

Source

Festival de Cannes official press conference (April 9, 2026); Variety, Screen Daily, Deadline, Wikipedia.