The 79th Cannes Film Festival opens Tuesday May 12 with Pierre Salvadori's La Vénus électrique and runs through May 23, fronted by an auteur slate that pointedly excludes the major US studios. [1] Festival head Thierry Frémaux confirmed the official selection in early April; Variety described the year as "auteur-driven" and indie-heavy.

Asghar Farhadi competes with Parallel Tales, his second French-language film and his fifth turn in Competition after The Past, The Salesman, Everybody Knows and A Hero, which won the 2021 Grand Prix. [2] The cast — Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa, Catherine Deneuve — is a who's-who of French cinema. The film is loosely adapted from the sixth chapter of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog.

Pedro Almodóvar returns with Bitter Christmas — his seventh attempt at the Palme d'Or — and Ira Sachs's The Man I Love stands as the only American film in Competition. [3] Hirokazu Kore-eda, Cristian Mungiu, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Pawel Pawlikowski and Nicolas Winding Refn round out the year. John Travolta makes his directorial debut in Cannes Premiere with Volo notturno per Los Angeles.

A separate festival inside the festival: ACID, the parallel sidebar, world-premieres the Iranian film Living Twice, Dying Thrice, the war's first cinematic answer from the country itself. The premiere lands eight days into the IRGC's 30-day Hormuz clock against Trump's reserved trigger.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles