The 79th Cannes Film Festival opens Tuesday May 12 and runs through Saturday May 23. Asghar Farhadi's "Parallel Tales," with Isabelle Huppert in the lead, is in competition for the Palme d'Or; the Iranian director Karim Lakzadeh's debut feature "Living Twice, Dying Thrice" has its world premiere in the ACID parallel sidebar [1]. Pedro Almodóvar, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Ira Sachs are also in competition. Naomi Watts leads "Margot & Rudi," with the Ukrainian dancer Alexandr Trush playing Rudolf Nureyev. The opening film is Pierre Salvadori's "The Electric Kiss."

The paper carried the festival opening with the jury still pending yesterday. Today's piece is the Iranian-cinema double. The decision to place Farhadi and Lakzadeh in the same festival, on competition and ACID respectively, is the programming choice that makes the 2026 festival recognizable as a political instrument in a year that is also the Hormuz blockade year, the Russia parade-scale-back year, and the Pope-Leo-on-everyone-might-have-food year. Cannes is rarely a peacetime festival in either direction; it is rarer still that the festival's two clearest political signals come from the same national cinema [2].

Farhadi's "Parallel Tales" is the seventh Farhadi feature and his fourth in competition at Cannes. The film, shot in France with a French-Iranian crew, follows a French magistrate (Huppert) reviewing the asylum application of an Iranian woman (Sara Bahrami) whose testimony does not match the documentary record her case file contains. The Cannes selection committee statement called the film "Farhadi's most direct treatment of testimony, voice, and evidentiary asymmetry." The Hollywood Reporter ran the lineup announcement with the Farhadi entry as the headline; Variety and Deadline emphasized the auteur-festival pull [3].

Lakzadeh's "Living Twice, Dying Thrice" is the more telling slot. The 31-year-old director, born in Tehran and now based in Berlin, made the film in Farsi with a cast of Iranian and Iranian-diaspora performers; the production was financed in part by the Doha Film Institute and in part by an Iranian crowdfunding effort that the director has not described publicly. The film is described in the festival catalogue as a "kammerspiel" — three actors in a single Tehran apartment over the course of one night following the death of an artist. ACID, the parallel section, has selected films by Iranian directors in exile in seven of the past eleven years; the 2026 selection is the first time the section has run an Iranian-made film whose director is currently in exile but whose principal cast filmed inside Iran [4].

The Watts-Trush "Margot & Rudi" is the Ukrainian cultural slot. The Nureyev biopic, directed by the British filmmaker Frances O'Connor, casts the Kyiv-trained Trush in his first Western leading role. Trush left Ukraine in 2024 and has been with the Berlin State Ballet since; the production filmed in Paris, London, and Lisbon over six months in 2025. The Cannes inclusion is in the Special Screenings section. The signal — a Ukrainian dancer playing the most famous Russian-Soviet defector of the twentieth century — is the festival's quietest political statement, and the most legible.

Almodóvar's "Mala Educación II" is the Spanish entry; Kore-eda's "Late Spring" is the Japanese; Ira Sachs's "Days of Heaven" is the U.S. competition entry. The competition slate runs to 22 films across 17 nationalities, with two by directors who have previously won the Palme d'Or. The festival president is Iris Knobloch. The jury president has not yet been announced; the May 2 paper expected the announcement Sunday or Monday.

The X read on the lineup is that Cannes is running its political register in 2026 in a way it has not since 2018, and that the Iranian double is the clearest part of the signal. Farhadi has not made a feature in Iran since "A Hero" in 2021; Lakzadeh has not been able to release his short films inside Iran since 2023. The competition placement of Farhadi and the ACID placement of Lakzadeh is the festival's choice to keep both lines visible in the same week [5].

The mainstream framing has been the Almodóvar-Kore-eda-Sachs auteur draw and the Watts-led "Margot & Rudi" prestige slot. The X framing has run on the Iranian-cinema-in-exile axis and the Ukrainian-cultural-slot axis. Both are festival readings; the question is whether the awards ceremony on May 23 reads the slate the same way the programming committee did.

The Croisette opens Tuesday. The first competition screening is Wednesday afternoon. The closing night is the Saturday after Eurovision and four days before the Cannes-trained Hormuz watch.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles