Cannes opens Tuesday. The festival's 79th edition runs May 12 through May 23 on the Croisette, with Pierre Salvadori's The Electric Kiss out of competition as the opening night film and Park Chan-wook presiding over a jury of eight. [1] [2] Park is the first Korean and the third Asian filmmaker in the festival's history to hold the presidency. The paper's Saturday read on the jury as institution treated the appointment as the festival's real opening image. Sunday is when the rest of the program comes into view.

The jury list is the festival's first editorial choice. Demi Moore, Stellan Skarsgard, Ruth Negga and Isaach De Bankole sit alongside writer-directors Chloe Zhao, Diego Cespedes, Laura Wandel and screenwriter Paul Laverty. [1] [2] Three of the directors have a Cannes prize on their shelf already; Zhao's Oscar circuit makes her the American festival politics seat without making her the American festival politics figurehead. Park's filmography has a richer Cannes hand than most jury presidents — Oldboy's 2004 Grand Prize, Thirst's 2009 Jury Prize, The Handmaiden in 2016, Decision to Leave's 2022 Best Director — and the jury he leads reads like a defense of authorship over branding. [3]

Salvadori's The Electric Kiss is the kind of opening film Cannes uses when it wants the curtain-raiser to set tone rather than dominate the room. The picture is a 1920s Paris comedy about a disillusioned artist and a sideshow performer pretending to be clairvoyant — Salvadori's eleventh feature in 34 years on the Croisette. It is not the festival's argument; it is the festival's overture. The argument arrives across the next eleven days in the 22-film competition that the jury will judge. [1]

The competition list itself is the year's first cultural negotiation. Returning Palme winners and first-timers share the slate. The opening week's schedule positions the Salvadori as a press-friendly start, with the heavier auteur titles — Anderson, Östlund, Ramsay, the Dardennes, Reichardt — distributed across the middle of the festival to keep the jury room from peaking early. The Palme d'Or is awarded the night of May 23.

The frame around all of this is the Gaza protest letter. More than 380 cinema figures — Almodovar, Lanthimos, Cuaron, Sarandon, Cronenberg, Pierce, Fiennes, Bardem, Gere — signed the open letter denouncing Israel's killing of Fatima Hassouna, the Gazan photojournalist whose face appears in Sepideh Farsi's documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, selected for ACID Cannes. [4] [5] The letter, published in Liberation and Variety, condemns industry silence over the war. The signatory count has grown past 900 in the days since. Hassouna was killed with ten relatives in an airstrike on her family home the day after the documentary's selection was announced. [4] The festival did not include the documentary in its main competition. The festival cannot keep it out of the conversation.

Park's jury room sits inside that protest weather. He has not given a public statement on the letter; he is unlikely to politicize the jury's deliberations from the rostrum. But Cannes has historically refused to pretend that politics has left the room — the festival applauds the absent, the boycotters, the targeted, sometimes within the same evening. The 2026 edition will not have the option of staying neutral on Hassouna. The opening-night red carpet, the Lumiere podium, the press conferences after each competition title: the protest will be priced into the room.

The American studio question is also on the carpet. Cannes has spent two decades negotiating its relationship with platforms that prefer not to release theatrically. This year's slate is heavier on traditional theatrical players than recent editions, which is itself a position. The ACID and Directors' Fortnight sidebars, where Hassouna's documentary lives, are the Croisette's reminder that auteur cinema does not need a marquee to matter.

Park Chan-wook leading the jury is the festival admitting that Korean cinema no longer needs Western validation to exist. That admission is also the festival's claim to relevance: Cannes survives by recognizing what the global grammar already is. The opening week will produce its usual measurement of applause by the minute, ovations clocked at five and ten, screening reports written before the credits roll. Those are the surface instruments. The deeper instrument is the jury room where personal taste becomes public hierarchy.

The Palme d'Or on May 23 will be one director's prize. The festival's larger transaction — what kind of cinema it claims to recognize, and what kind of silence it refuses — runs the entire two weeks. Tuesday opens with Salvadori. Tuesday also opens with a jury that reads the slate from the inside of a global protest. Both are the festival.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles