Asghar Farhadi's Parallel Tales and Pawel Pawlikowski's Fatherland both screen in Competition today, Thursday May 14 — Day Three of the 79th Festival de Cannes and the second real jury test after Koji Fukada's Nagi Notes opened the grid at 2.5 yesterday. [1] Parallel Tales is Farhadi's tenth feature and his second French-language film after The Past. Isabelle Huppert plays Sylvie, a novelist who spies on her neighbours and hires a young assistant named Adam (Adam Bessa) who upends her life and her fiction; Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney and Catherine Deneuve round out the ensemble. The screenplay is co-written with Massoumeh Lahidji and loosely adapts Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog: Six. [2] Fatherland is Pawlikowski's first film since Cold War in 2018 and stars Sandra Hüller as Erika Mann driving her exiled father Thomas Mann from American-occupied Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar in 1949. [3]

Park Chan-wook is in his second working day as jury president. Both directors have prior Cannes Competition credentials that matter for tonight's grid math. Farhadi won the Grand Prix for A Hero in 2021 and two Best Foreign Language Oscars for A Separation (2012) and The Salesman (2017). Pawlikowski won Best Director for Cold War in 2018 and brought Ida through the festival to its 2015 foreign-language Oscar. Last year's grid was topped at 3.1 by Sergei Loznitsa and Jafar Panahi. The 2018 record on the grid — Lee Chang-dong's Burning at 3.8 — remains unbroken. If either Parallel Tales or Fatherland lands above 3.0, the Nagi Notes 2.5 becomes a base rate rather than a trend; if both land below, the Competition begins to look like a year that will reward formal command over emotional ambition.

The unspoken sub-test is geopolitical. Parallel Tales is an Iranian director's French-language film opening at Cannes the same week the Trump-Xi summit produced its readout on Iran and the same week Iran institutionalised the Hormuz Strait toll. Farhadi's premiere is also his theatrical release in France today — Memento Films is distributing day-and-date with the festival. Fatherland is a Polish director's German-language exile drama landing at a moment when Wim Wenders's silence on Berlin's Ukraine cinema fund disqualification is the parallel European-festival story. Park's jury reads neither of those into the brief. The question is whether either film survives them.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles