Cannes opens wide-open Palme d’Or race with war, grief and AI films

Cannes began its 79th edition with a Palme d’Or race that looks unusually open, and unusually anxious. The festival runs from May 12 to May 23 at the Palais des Festivals, but the absence of the usual blockbuster-heavy studio push has left the Competition field defined less by red-carpet spectacle than by war, grief and artificial intelligence.

The numbers underline the shift. Cannes said 2,541 feature films were submitted for the official selection, down from last year’s 2,909, and the main Competition was first announced with 21 titles before being expanded to 22. The opening film is Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss, while the winner will be named at the closing ceremony on May 23. The last Palme d’Or went to Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident in 2025, setting a high bar for another politically charged, internationally watched finale.

This year’s Competition is heavy on auteur cinema and light on American muscle. Deadline reported that only one U.S. title made the Competition slate, Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love, a drama set in 1980s New York City and centered on the AIDS crisis, with Rami Malek in the cast. James Gray’s Paper Tiger, reuniting Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver after Marriage Story, adds another U.S. presence to the wider festival conversation, but not the same sense of studio weight that often shapes Cannes chatter. Screen reported that five female filmmakers are in Competition, and that France, Japan and Spain account for a large share of the lineup.

The strongest thematic current is not present-day polemics but conflict refracted through history and family fracture. Several titles are set against World War One, the French Resistance or Vichy France, suggesting that Cannes is again treating political violence through period cinema rather than overt contemporary drama. Among the returning names is Cristian Mungiu, the Romanian director back in the hunt for a second Palme d’Or with Fjord, set in a remote Norwegian village and starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan. Hirokazu Kore-eda is also in contention with Sheep In The Box, described as a film about grief and AI.

That AI thread has already become one of the festival’s defining off-screen disputes. Thierry Frémaux has said Cannes stands with artists, screenwriters, actors and voice actors as the industry wrestles with machine-made content, even as the festival has also signed a multi-year sponsorship deal with Meta. The tension between those positions mirrors the lineup itself: a prestigious global festival trying to champion human authorship while acknowledging the technology and market forces now reshaping cinema. With no obvious front-runner, Cannes opens not with certainty, but with a clearer view of the industry’s unease.