The 2026 Cannes Film Festival lineup was announced this morning, and among the headline filmmakers set to debut new works are veteran American indie director Ira Sachs and Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. Scroll down for the full list of titles.
Ira Sachs will screen The Man I Love, a feature set in 1980s New York. The film 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 in the film 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 Berenice Bejo, who won the Best Actress award for her performance at Cannes in 2013.
Elsewhere, the buzzy American filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun returns with a new feature titled Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Schoenbrun’s latest is one of the most-talked-about 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 screen in UCR. 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 Avedon.
There’s a large Spanish contingent on the Croisette this year, with Pedro Almodóvar screening his latest Bitter Christmas. 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.
Overall, five women are debuting films in Competition, which Frémaux said this morning during the presser was a high for the festival. 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. Fremaux also noted that 2,541 feature films were submitted for official selection. “That’s 1,000 more than just 10 years ago,” he said.
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 from May 12 to 23.
COMPETITIONMinotaur, 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
Le Corset, Louis Clichy
Benimana, Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo
Elephants in the Fog, Abinash Bikram Shah
OUT OF COMPETITIONHer 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
CANNES PREMIEREPropeller One-Way, John Travolta
Kokurojo: 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 SCREENINGSJohn Lennon: The Last Interview, Steven Soderbergh
Avedon, Ron Howard
Les Survivants du Che, Christophe Réveille
Les Matins Merveilleux – Avril Besson
MIDNIGHT SCREENINGSRoma elastica, Bertrand Mandico
Jim Queen, Nicolas Athane and Marco Nguyen
Full Phil, Quentin Dupieux
Colony, Yeon Sang-ho
Sanguine, Marion Le Coroller
