The 2026 Cannes Film Festival Competition lineup includes a Belgian entry: Lukas Dhont‘s Coward, announced April 9 at the Pathé Palace cinema in Paris. The 79th edition runs May 12 to 23.
Thierry Frémaux revealed the Official Selection alongside festival president Iris Knobloch. Of 2,541 submitted features (up around 1,000 from a decade ago but below last year’s record of 2,909), 21 titles were named to Competition, with Frémaux noting one further title will follow.
Programmers screened Coward just one day before the announcement
Many in the industry had assumed Coward would not be ready in time. Frémaux confirmed that programmers only saw the film the day before the announcement. The First World War drama examines what heroism and cowardice mean from the perspectives of young soldiers, and was partially shot on the actual battlefields near Ypres. The Match Factory handles international sales.
Both of Dhont’s previous features premiered at Cannes: Girl in Un Certain Regard in 2018 and Close in Competition in 2022, with the latter earning an Oscar nomination.
Competition highlights
Pedro Almodovar enters his eighth Competition title with Bitter Christmas, which recently opened in Spain. Asghar Farhadi returns with Parallel Tales, a French-language film starring Isabelle Huppert, Catherine Deneuve, and Vincent Cassel, his fifth Competition entry. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Palme d’Or winner for Shoplifters in 2018, brings Sheep In The Box, a near-future drama about a couple who take a humanoid robot into their home.
Pawel Pawlikowski, who won best director at Cannes in 2018 for Cold War, returns with Fatherland, starring Sandra Hüller as Erika Mann opposite Hanns Zischler as Thomas Mann. Ryusuke Hamaguchi follows Drive My Car with All Of A Sudden, his first film shot outside Japan, with Virginie Efira in the lead. Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin makes his English-language debut with sci-fi thriller Hope, starring Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Hoyeon.
Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, whose 2015 debut Son Of Saul won the Grand Prix, returns with Moulin, a biopic of French resistance leader Jean Moulin played by Gilles Lellouche. Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, Palme d’Or winner for 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, brings Fjord, with Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan as religious parents relocating from Romania to a Norwegian village.
Spain accounts for three Competition entries. Rodrigo Sorogoyen brings The Beloved, with Javier Bardem as a celebrated filmmaker reunited with his daughter on a desert shoot. Filmmaking duo Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo present The Black Ball, a queer-themed story spanning 1932, 1937, and 2017, with Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close in the cast.
Five female filmmakers are in Competition this year: Germany’s Valeska Grisebach, Austria’s Marie Kreutzer, and France’s Jeanne Herry, Lea Mysius, and Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet.
Jury and honorary Palmes
Park Chan-wook will preside over the Competition jury. Peter Jackson and Barbra Streisand will each receive an honorary Palme d’Or.
Two widely anticipated titles did not make the Competition lineup: James Gray’s Paper Tiger and Ruben Östlund‘s The Entertainment System Is Down.