Screen International's 2026 Cannes jury grid opened Thursday morning with a 2.5 average for Koji Fukada's Nagi Notes, the festival's first Competition title and the first marker on a board that will hold twenty-two films before the Palme d'Or is awarded on May 23. [1] Twelve critics scored the film. Katja Nicodemus of Die Zeit gave it four stars. Mathieu Macheret of Le Monde gave it one. The rest sat in twos and threes. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet's A Woman's Life opened on the same row with a 1.9. Last year's grid was jointly topped by Sergei Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors and Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident at 3.1. The record on the grid since it began is Lee Chang-dong's Burning, which scored 3.8 at the 2018 festival. Burning did not win the Palme.

The paper's Wednesday account framed jury president Park Chan-wook as a taste governor running the festival like a courtroom, with the Gaza pre-trial visible in the opening press conference. The grid is the parallel proceeding. Park does not have to read it — the jury is famously instructed to ignore it — but it shapes the analytical discourse around the festival and the sales conversations on the Marché du Film. A 2.5 opening for a film placed first in Competition is not a verdict on the film; it is information about what kind of festival this is. This year's festival, on Day Three, looks like one that will reward small, careful, scenic cinema and ask the protest politics of the opening press conference to do most of their work outside the screening rooms.

Nagi Notes is a rural Japanese drama about a sculptor named Yoriko, played by Takako Matsu, who hosts her divorced former sister-in-law Yuri, played by Shizuka Ishibashi, for a week in a mountain town near a Self-Defense Force training base. [2] Fukada wrote and directed; the script is adapted from Oriza Hirata's 1994 play Tōkyō Notes, itself loosely based on Ozu's Tokyo Story. There are insert shots of calendars, soft daily radio bulletins announcing local deaths, and a teenage queer subplot between two of Yoriko's art students. The critical reads have been kind without being enthusiastic. Variety's Guy Lodge called it "subtly stirring" and noted it returns Fukada to the form of his 2016 Un Certain Regard winner Harmonium. [3] David Ehrlich at IndieWire called it "quietly spectacular." Wendy Ide at Screen called it "unassertive in its themes and, at times, gentle almost to a fault." That sentence is the grid score in prose.

Two more Competition films arrive today. Asghar Farhadi's Parallel Tales, his second French-language film after The Past, stars Isabelle Huppert as a novelist who hires a young assistant who upends her life and her fiction; Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney and Catherine Deneuve fill the ensemble. [4] Pawel Pawlikowski's Fatherland is a 1949 Cold War road drama starring Sandra Hüller as Erika Mann, daughter of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, driving with her father across a divided Germany in a black Buick. Both directors have prior Cannes Competition credentials. Farhadi won the Grand Prix for A Hero in 2021. Pawlikowski won Best Director for Cold War in 2018 and brought Ida and Cold War through the festival in successive cycles.

What today tests is what the grid is for. If Farhadi and Pawlikowski land near or above the 3.1 ceiling that defined last year's strongest titles, the Nagi Notes opening becomes a base rate, not a downward trend line, and Park's jury inherits a Competition row with three films at credible scoring distance from the Burning mark. If both land below 2.5, the grid begins to suggest that this is a year in which the Palme will go to a film no one priced in advance — the festival's most honest result, and the one that justifies Park's insistence in Wednesday's press conference that "politics and art should not be divided" without making any film actually win on that basis. [5]

Cannes structurally privileges what a sub-par-grid Japanese melodrama achieves on its own terms: a "scenic cinema" film that lets a 110-minute portrait of two women in a rural town carry more weight than the opening salvos of a jury press conference in which Paul Laverty named individual American actors as blacklisted. Park's Decision to Leave, his last Competition entry, was scored 3.0 on the grid in 2022 and won Best Director. The grid is not a leaderboard. It is the festival's nervous system showing what it has metabolized so far. On Day Three, it has metabolized 2.5 of 4. There are nineteen films to go.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles