What is the honour of cinema? – The 79th Cannes Film Festival

“even scratched to death
a simple rectangle of
thirty-five millimeters
saves the honor
of all of the real. “

– J.-L. Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998)

Looking Back on Cannes as a Japanese Journalist

“What is cinema? (Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?)” This was the unfinished question that French film critic André Bazin (1918–1958) pursued across his life. Yet looking back now, one might say that Bazin was, in a certain sense, fortunate: he lived in an age when that question could still be thought primarily within an aesthetic dimension. From its very inception, the Festival de Cannes has never been immune to politics. The first edition, scheduled for September 1939, was cancelled over the outbreak of World War Ⅱ, its opening deferred until 1946. The festival had been conceived as a stage for cultural cooperation between nations, a theatre of universalism. Yet, at least in Bazin’s era, the question “what is cinema?” could still be held as one internal to the screen itself, orbiting such issues as realism, montage – what it is and what it forbids – or how film can bear witness to the world. 

Cannes’ own architecture – its star system, media machinery, market logic, and all other excesses – had not yet surged to the foreground. It was the festival’s commodification and globalisation, which accelerated under the Gilles Jacob regime, that would transform it into the Cannes we know today. And as the world sinks deeper into confusion, the question “what is cinema?” can no longer be thought of as a purely aesthetic inquiry. There are many aspects we must discuss: war, diaspora, gender and queer identity, colonialism, platform capitalism, etc. Within this constellation of urgent problems, cinema emerges already entangled with politics, economics, and ethics. It is for this reason that the question we must now ask is no longer “what is cinema?” but rather: “what is the honour of cinema?” 

Such was the dilemma the 79th Cannes Film Festival orbited. In October 2025, the Marché du Film – Cannes’ industry market – selected Japan, the author’s homeland, as its Country of Honour. The designation is awarded each year to a single nation, with the aim of shining a light on that country’s film industry. It was the first time Japan had been selected. The result was striking: the number of Japanese participants accredited with a market badge rose by approximately 50 percent compared to the previous year, further buoyed by the joint presentation of Japan-IP Market, co-organised with TIFFCOM – the market of the Tokyo International Film Festival.¹ Business deals concluded and pitching projects submitted increased substantially. In other words, Japanese cinema was welcomed back to Cannes as a significant industry player.

Sheep in the Box

At Cannes 2026, Japanese cinema made its presence felt in the festival’s lineup, to an extent rarely seen in recent editions. The Competition welcomed, for the first time in 25 years, three Japanese films: Koreeda Hirokazu’s Hako no Naka no Hitsuji (Sheep in the Box – all titles 2026 unless otherwise noted), Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Soudain (All of a Sudden), and Fukada Kohji’s Nagi daiarî (Nagi Notes). We should, of course, resist the temptation to read this as straightforward evidence of a great leap forward for Japanese cinema. Yet the relationships among the three filmmakers are nonetheless fascinating. Since his first Competition entry, Distance (2001), Koreeda has continued to reign – for better or worse – at the very centre of Cannes. A filmmaker of a younger generation, Hamaguchi enters the Competition for the third time, consolidating his increasingly unassailable position as one of the defining filmmakers representing Japanese cinema on the circuit. As for Fukada – Hamaguchi’s contemporary – this marks his first-ever entry into the Competition. 

The Samurai and the Prisoner

Elsewhere in the programme, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner screened in the Cannes Premiere section. The film can be understood as the director’s attempt to reconstruct, within the classical form of the period drama, the methods of suspense he has honed with unrelenting consistency throughout his career – the unsettling warping of space, the premonition of violence – establishing, through a new stylistic register, a system of cinematic dread and tension distinctly his own. Established masters aside, a new generation stepped into the spotlight. Sode Yukiko’s Subete mayonaka no koibitotachi (All the Lovers in the Night) bowed in the Un Certain Regard sidebar; Kadowaki Kohei’s Wareware wa uchûjin (We Are Aliens) and Yano Honami’s Eri were selected for the Directors’ Fortnight. In these films, the inheritance of and deviation from a Japanese filmmaking spirit – one that has long attempted to preserve its politique des auteurs while adapting to the French film market – are inextricably entwined.

All the Lovers in the Night

At Cannes 2026, Japanese cinema – existing within the framework of international co-productions – represented something beyond films as such: it marked a generational shift. Simultaneously, this heightened presence signals that Japanese cinema stands at a transitional moment, being drawn ever more deeply into the machinery of the global festival system. What must be asked here is not simply whether Japanese cinema has been recognised by the world. The question is rather: in what form does Japanese cinema circulate through the global market, and how is it consumed?

This is why the word “honour” deserves better spelling. One cannot reduce it to a simple schema. To win an award at a festival, to be selected, to receive the esteem of critics – all of these are forms of honour. But turning toward the market – closing a distribution deal, being recognised in a pitching competition, drawing the attention of producers, securing a budget – these too function as different kinds of honour. The contemporary film festival is, in other words, a space in which aesthetic praise and economic success are wound together in profound complexity. When a nation is celebrated as a Country of Honour by a festival, is that recognition of its film culture as such – or recognition of its economic value as a content industry? At today’s Cannes, nation and cinema can no longer be held apart. The festival has become not only an artistic theatre but a vast political-economic arena in which national branding and market strategy converge. And yet this condition cannot simply be condemned. For cinema, since its origin, has always existed within the contradiction between industry and art. The problem is not that cinema is connected to the market. The problem is whether, within that connection, cinema can still confront the violence and contradictions of the world. It is for this reason that we must once again ask: what is the honour of cinema?

All of a Sudden

Can cinema be said to have truly attained honour by being absorbed into national prestige and market value? What is striking is the congratulatory message posted on X by Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae – a right-wing militarist – upon Tao Okamoto and Virginie Efira’s joint Best Actress Award for All of a Sudden. In Takaichi’s message, the aesthetic elements of the film and its content were absent; what was foregrounded instead was the international success of a Japanese actress, and the results of the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ production subsidy programme.² The award itself was celebrated as a national achievement. It is not, of course, unusual for a politician to offer congratulations on cultural success. But inscribed within that language is an unmistakable gaze – one that regards cinema, above all, as an instrument of national prestige. Cinema is treated here not as a form of individual expression, but as cultural capital reinforcing the brand of the nation-state of Japan. In that moment, the word “honour” slides away from artistic inquiry and critical thought, connecting instead to the logic of national recognition and competition. Or is it, conversely, that the true honour of cinema resides precisely within – and despite – such institutionalisation and nationalism, continuing still to illuminate the fissures, the violence, the contradictions of the world?

Deconstructing Cannes

The various problems surrounding “cinéma” in Cannes have been taken up and critically examined on many occasions before. In recent years, one of the sharpest analysts working in Japan has been the film scholar Tsukidate Nanako. In her report on the 2025 Festival de Cannes for Nobodymag³ Tsukidate asserts something that bears repeating: most foreign films selected for Cannes’ official sections are, in practice, deeply bound to French capital. That is to say – except for North American productions and those from a handful of European countries with robust production systems of their own – nearly every film that reaches the official selection is either a co-production with France or a film for which French distribution has already been secured. This observation is of decisive importance. For what it reveals is not merely a film festival, but a vast system of distribution and legitimation – one in which the French film industry forms the irreducible core. In Tsukidate’s formulation, Cannes is, in a very real sense, a French film festival – by France, for France – and the world’s most influential space of advance exhibition. But this problem ought not to be reduced to a simple critique of French centrism. What matters more is something deeper: that the institution of the film festival itself is constituted by contradictions – between art and market, between visibility and exclusion, between success and oblivion.

In a critical essay on Cannes published in Telos in 2023, film sociologists Kristian Feigelson and Laurent Creton identify this contradiction with precision.⁴ The film industry, they argue, stages antagonisms and draws from them the very energy that drives the economy of art and culture. The aspiration to create and produce continues to expand across the world – and yet, despite the growth and refinement of distribution systems, a fierce and contradictory tension persists without resolution. More films are made than ever before, yet most of them are seen by fewer people. Disappointment and failure are the rule; success, the rare exception. For every handful of films and filmmakers raised to the pinnacle, how many will never reach the visibility they hoped for, the recognition they dreamed of, the audience they had counted on? Over the years, the festival has become a compartmentalised stage, split between its public-facing showcase illuminating the stars, the vast professional apparatus keeping the system in motion, and a general audience held behind metal barriers, for whom access to the screening rooms is virtually impossible. Here too, the same intense tension persists – between what is at once desirable and unreachable.

The Politics of Selection: An Analysis of the Competition

What matters most at a film festival is not ultimately the awards themselves, but the act of selection that precedes them. Selection determines what kinds of cinema the world is invited to see, discuss, and legitimate. Reflected within that process are aesthetic values, market structures, political ethics, and institutional desire. The 2026 Competition revealed a striking concentration of films dealing with war, migration, queerness, and care. Yet what emerged was not a cinema of radical formal rupture, but a carefully calibrated politics. Cannes appeared increasingly drawn toward films capable of translating contemporary crises into forms that remain legible within the institutional grammar of the festival. Politics was welcomed, even desired, so long as it remained consumable.

Fjord

Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner Fjord exemplified this tendency. Following a Romanian immigrant family caught within the Norwegian welfare system, the film sharply depicts administrative violence enacted through the language of protection. Yet Mungiu never allows institutional violence to fully corrode the film’s world. The landscapes remain visually intact, their beauty carefully preserved. Fjord confronts contemporary political anxiety while remaining securely within the aesthetic and moral balance favoured by Cannes.

A similar contradiction structures Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Grand Prix winner Minotaur. Set against the shadow of the Russia-Ukraine war, the film traces the collapse of a bourgeois Russian household – adapted from Claude Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle (The Unfaithful Wife, 1969) – while invoking the monstrous figure of the Minotaur. Yet the immensity of war never fully transforms the psychological drama at the film’s centre. Even its final aerial images drift toward aestheticised melancholy rather than historical rupture. Violence is represented but never allowed to destabilise cinematic form itself.

Other prize-winning films revealed comparable tendencies, yet each demonstrated an authorial approach that refused to settle into a single solution. Valeska Grisebach’s Das geträumte Abenteuer (The Dreamed Adventure) approached political violence obliquely – through archaeology, memory, and the uneasy temporality of border regions – finding in that indirection a quietly radical form. Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, centred on Thomas Mann’s return to Germany after his self-imposed exile, pressed against the limits of European humanism from within, questioning whether postwar reconciliation could ever amount to more than consolation. Emmanuel Marre’s Notre salut (A Man of His Time) perhaps came closest to collapsing historical distance altogether, presenting Vichy fascism not as a completed past but as a continuing structure of seduction and insecurity – and in doing so, demonstrated that the film’s observational mode could carry genuine political urgency.

Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden stood out for the seriousness with which it approached care, illness, and incomprehension. Through multilingual exchanges between two women whose names mirror one another, Hamaguchi refuses the fantasy of transparent communication. Silence, mistranslation, and opacity persist throughout the film. Yet even here, the film remains carefully contained within a highly articulate dramatic structure. Body Care emerges less as social rupture than as an ethics of coexistence.

Lucas Dhont’s Coward, by contrast, exposed the limits of this contemporary festival politics most clearly. Combining the two themes most visible at Cannes this year – war and queerness – the film transforms both into aesthetic atmosphere. War becomes distant mood rather than material violence, while queer desire is reduced to a familiar tragic schema. What remains is less confrontation with history than a politics already formatted for festival circulation. 

Paper Tiger

The most revealing films of Cannes may have been those left unawarded. James Gray’s Paper Tiger traced the collapse of the American middle class during the final years of the Cold War, rendering history not as discourse but as spatial corruption. Homes, roads, and factories gradually become sites of invisible entrapment. Pedro Almodóvar’s Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas) turned inward toward the death of the auteur itself, interrogating cinema through melodrama, repetition, and self-destruction. At the opposite pole stood László Nemes’ Moulin, whose treatment of Nazism ultimately retreated into polished suspense, unable to recover the ontological terror that animated Saul fia (Son of Saul, 2015).

What Cannes revealed this year was therefore not simply a renewed political consciousness, but the increasing institutionalisation of politics itself. War, migration, queerness, fascism, and care circulate today as globally legible themes within the festival economy. The question is no longer whether cinema addresses political crises, but whether those crises are allowed to destabilise cinematic form and the institution that contains it. Rarely has the logic of selection – and the politics embedded within it – appeared so visible as it did at Cannes 2026.

Masters and Newcomers: Radical Practices of Cinema

Yet Cannes does not function only as a site of institutional recognition. Even within the festival system, certain filmmakers continue to resist its logic from within, attempting to deviate from its increasingly managed forms of visibility. What stood out most clearly in this year’s parallel sections was the persistence – across generations – of filmmakers still interrogating cinema itself.

Alain Cavalier’s Merci d’être venu (Thanks for Coming), presented as his final film in the Directors’ Fortnight, distilled his lifelong practice of filmer to its purest form. Cavalier, who long resisted the very title of director, turns once again to the digital camera not as a recording device but as a way of inhabiting the world. Filming daily lives, the aging body, and the act of regarding itself, he quietly demonstrates that beyond the machinery of festival cinema, the possibility of a personal and radically modest practice still survives.

Elsewhere in the Fortnight, Radu Jude’s Le journal d’une femme de chambre (The Diary of a Chambermaid) more directly attacked the political economy of contemporary Europe. Through the figure of a Romanian housekeeper moving across a Western European space structured by class and geopolitical hierarchy, the film exposes the unconscious violence embedded within liberal discourse itself. Yet even here, Jude’s characteristic cruelty and absurdism feel partially restrained, shaped into a more legible form within the festival institution. Still, Diary remains compelling precisely because it stages that tension between radical anger and institutional containment.

La Gradiva

The most striking discovery of the year was Marine Atlan’s debut feature and Critics’ Week entry La Gradiva. Set during a school trip to Pompeii, the film links youth, desire, history, and death with remarkable formal confidence. Moving fluidly between photographic stillness and cinematic movement, Atlan transforms the ruins of Pompeii into a space where contemporary bodies encounter the sediment of history itself. Refusing both didactic politics and the trappings of conventional youth dramas, La Gradiva emerged as one of the rare films at Cannes to have truly sublimated history – not as mere theme, but into artistic form itself.

Conclusion

In Images in Spite of All, Georges Didi-Huberman speaks of the necessity of maintaining the image against everything – to hold fast to the image of the world outside, and in order to do so, to snatch from that hell an activity of knowledge, a kind of curiosity.⁵ Looking back on this year’s Cannes, the words seem especially illuminating. As we have traced throughout this essay, the festival today exists as a vast system in which national prestige, market strategy, institutional consecration, and carefully administered politics are indissolubly and intricately bound together. Within that system, countless works are rendered visible – and countless others are driven into silence. And yet, in spite of all this, filmmakers continue to hold fast to the image. The desire to go on depicting the different kinds of violence plaguing the world has not been entirely extinguished by the institution.

Pelechian Project

This is why the premiere of Pelechian Project – a film mosaic stitching together 4K restorations of several of the Armenian director’s works, unveiled in the Cannes Classics section – proved all the more significant. For Pelechian, montage is the act of reorganising time itself – of seizing the movement of the world and recomposing it as image. Let us recall what Didi-Huberman writes in Remontages du temps subi: 

“To reassemble time suffered: to raise one’s anger to the height of a thought, one’s thought to the height of an expression, one’s expression to the height of a gaze. To practice a phenomenology of small images. To dismantle their order, to reassemble their hidden coherence. To return to one’s anger — which has at last found its form — without forgetting the suffering of the world that had, at first, given rise to it.”⁶

These words double as an ethics of film criticism itself.

What was at stake at this year’s Cannes was precisely this difficulty of maintaining the image. The institution converts political urgency into manageable form, connecting cinema to market value and national honour. And yet, filmmakers continue to wrest from the crevices and violence of the world something that holds as image. Some films succeeded; others failed. Some were absorbed back into the institution; others struggled to deviate from it. Still, what matters is not success or failure, but that cinema still holds and radiates a desire to go on depicting the world. And so, at last, the question must be asked once more. What is the honour of cinema? Is it to receive a prize? To circulate through the market? To be celebrated as a national triumph? Or is it – in the face of the world’s pain and violence – to go on holding fast to the image, without surrender? This year’s Cannes offered no clear answer to these questions. But this much, at least, can be said: the honour of cinema does not reside in the title conferred by any institution. It resides only in that unceasing movement: the refusal to look away from the fissures of the world.

Festival de Cannes
12 – 23 May 2026
https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/

Endnotes