A correction the paper owes its readers up front. The May 13 Cannes account framed Kantemir Balagov, the Russian-born exile director now based in the United States, as "at the top" of the festival's Competition through Day Two. [1] He was not in Competition. Butterfly Jam, his English-language debut, opened the Directors' Fortnight sidebar on Wednesday — a parallel program that runs alongside the Festival de Cannes but is not part of the Palme d'Or race. [2] The film also was not received as a Competition-grade artifact would have been. The framing in the Tuesday paper described what the paper expected. What screened on Wednesday is what we are correcting against today.

Butterfly Jam is a 102-minute drama set in a Circassian-American diaspora community in Newark, New Jersey, originally written by Balagov to be filmed in his native Kabardino-Balkaria before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted him into exile in the United States. [3] Barry Keoghan and Riley Keough star as Circassian siblings running a struggling family diner that specializes in delens, a traditional Circassian potato-and-cheese pie; Talha Akdogan is the teenage son who trains as a wrestler when not behind the counter; Harry Melling and Monica Bellucci appear in supporting parts. Alexander Rodnyansky — Balagov's longstanding producer, also a Ukrainian-born exile — produced with Pascal Caucheteux of Why Not Productions. Goodfellas handles international sales; Le Pacte distributes in France.

The reception on Wednesday and Thursday is divided enough to be diagnosed honestly. Jordan Ruimy at World of Reel called it "a shaky, directionless misfire" and "a disaster"; the headline phrase made the rounds before the film's second screening had even ended. [4] Eric Lavallée at IONCINEMA — usually a Balagov supporter — wrote that "Balagov's latest suffers in comparison to other contemporary filmmakers covering similar territory," explicitly comparing the New Jersey relocation unfavorably to Sean Baker's Anora, Andrea Arnold's Bird, and Brady Corbet's The Brutalist. [5] Film Stage said the picture "can't find a rhythm." Guy Lodge at Variety was more positive, calling it "vibrant but unruly" and praising the immigrant-displacement portrait, but the review was qualified rather than rapturous. [6] What unites the reads is not a verdict on Balagov's instincts as a filmmaker — Beanpole won the Un Certain Regard directing prize in 2019 and remains one of the strongest debuts at any festival in the past decade — but a verdict on what happens when a director's signature material is rewritten across two continents and two languages by a writer working outside his native tongue for the first time.

The structural question is whether Butterfly Jam's placement in Directors' Fortnight rather than the main Competition was the festival's verdict before the screenings began. Programmers do not advertise their rejections. Thierry Frémaux has consistently declined to discuss which films he considered for the Competition list and chose to place in the sidebars, and the official Cannes selection committee operates under non-disclosure. But the festival's Competition lineup this year included two films from exiled or politically displaced directors — Asghar Farhadi from Iran and Pawel Pawlikowski from Poland — both with substantial European-language credentials and both screening today. Balagov's English-language pivot did not, at minimum, place him in the same room. The Fortnight programmers, run separately by the Société des Réalisateurs de Films and led this year by Julien Rejl, may simply have moved faster.

The Russian-exile filmmaker arc has been a New York–and–Berlin–and–Los Angeles story for three years. Balagov fled Moscow in 2022, briefly worked in Georgia awaiting an O-1B visa, was attached to direct the pilot of HBO's The Last of Us before Craig Mazin took over (with roughly 40 percent of Balagov's footage retained in the broadcast cut), and has since lived between Brooklyn and Los Angeles with his partner and frequent collaborator Kira Kovalenko. [3] Butterfly Jam was supposed to be the artist's first American statement. What Wednesday's reception suggests is that the statement is harder than the move. Yorgos Lanthimos, who made The Favourite and Poor Things in English with no apparent friction, did not translate from Russian. Christian Petzold, who tried English-language production once and never tried it again, has been honest about why. Balagov is between them — capable of Beanpole's formal command, learning a script in a second language under festival deadline conditions.

The cleanest read on Day Three is that the paper's Tuesday framing was forward-looking and the Wednesday screenings were backward-correcting. Both are honest. The Cannes selection process privileges anticipation. The Cannes screening process replaces anticipation with footage. Tomorrow morning Parallel Tales and Fatherland will produce their own line of reviews and grid scores, and the question of whether 2026 turns out to be a Pawlikowski festival, a Farhadi festival, or a festival the jury delivers to a film no one has yet priced will start moving. Butterfly Jam will not be in that conversation. It was not built to be. The May 13 paper has been corrected, on the record, in today's prose.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles