This year, the 79e Cannes Festival is marked by the paradox of welcoming a large number of French films, including a third of the official selection, while being devoid of the presence of most of the big names in French cinema, which the festival has also largely contributed to gaining recognition in the past. The logical corollary of this situation is the possibility of discoveries of new names. All sections combined, we can indeed find cinema offerings on the Croisette that are more than promising and even very accomplished.
Mention has already been made here of Bad star (by Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier) and Secret heart (directed by Tom Fontenille), two beautiful discoveries made as part of the ACID selection, at the start of the event. Looking forward to Our salvationthe second feature film by Emmanuel Marre (in competition), then the third film by Léa Mysius, Night storieswhich will close the official competition, at least four other titles reinforce this aspect of Cannes’ offering in 2026.
“The Unknown”, by Arthur Harari (in competition)
Already director of two noted films, Black Diamond (2016) and especially the very beautiful Onoda, 10,000 nights in the jungle (2021), also co-writer ofAnatomy of a fall by Justine Triet (2024), actor notably in The Goldman Trial by Cédric Kahn (2023) and recognized co-author of comic strips (with his brother Lucas), Arthur Harari is not exactly a newcomer.
The fact remains that his Unknown consecrates his accomplishment as a filmmaker of the first magnitude. The ambition of the film, inspired by the comic strip The David Zimmerman Case (2024), which he co-wrote with his brother, also co-writer of the feature film, is as obvious as the result is disturbing. From a drawn album to a cinema screen, it is obvious to say that the major change is the presence of bodies. However, this is exactly the subject of the film.
If Niels Schneider, dark and tense, masculine and fragile, imposes the presence of a male and unhealthy appearance, inhabited by a very young girl, it is even more Léa Seydoux who impresses.
This is based on a bias of pure fiction. David (Niels Schneider) is a young and withdrawn man, a photographer absorbed in a quest for traces of the past and the passage of time. During a very wild party, he takes a substance that a stranger offered him. Just afterwards, he saw in the crowd a young woman seen a few days before and whose presence had impressed him enough for him to try to follow her, after having photographed her.
Following a passionate embrace, he wakes up in the skin of this person who we learn is named Eva (Léa Seydoux). David in Eva’s body will then meet Malia (Lilith Grasmug), a teenager who is in David’s skin. These two dual beings embark on a long quest, both to understand what could have happened, who else might have undergone the same mutation and how to escape this fate.
Game about identity disorder and gender belonging, The Unknown is also an emotional odyssey, where what the protagonists experience is considered for its emotional charge, as well as as an ingredient of a meditation both on what we define ourselves by, for ourselves and in the eyes of others, and on what stabilizes and makes relevant a fictional character.
This quest, both very physical and very abstract, is carried by the power of incarnation of the two main performers. And if Niels Schneider, dark and tense, masculine and fragile, imposes the presence of this masculine and unhealthy appearance, inhabited by a very young girl, it is even more Léa Seydoux who impresses.
If neither her beauty nor her talent are discoveries, we find her here with a body noticeably heavier than during her previous numerous appearances on screen. The fact that she shot the film just after giving birth is the technical explanation.
This modification, shown clearly (once) but then present, this shift in relation to the dominant canons of female seduction and in relation to the established image of the actress reinforce and make even more mobile this Eva/David, a forever mysterious and moving figure that we hesitate to name. And this hesitation is at the heart of the disturbing beauty of The Unknown.
“La Gradiva”, by Marine Atlan (Critics’ Week)
Marine Atlan’s first feature film is also built on the question of appearances, but in a very different way. The beginning, which accompanies a class of French high school students and their teacher on a trip to Naples and Pompeii (Campania, southern Italy), initially appears to reproduce the classic mechanisms of the group teen film. And if there will indeed be the discovery of new feelings, rivalries, seductions, friends from childhood and the curiosity of a world to discover and inhabit, La Gradiva continues to be enriched with new tones.
Around Toni, whose grandmother comes from the region where the students are housed, a young man driven by contradictory impulses, Suzanne, Jame and the teacher who accompanies the group, multiple other approaches proliferate. They are nourished by a documentary relationship with the city, very present and very well filmed, by a whole assortment of mechanisms activated by various ways of using words and by the decisive role of this impressive physical archive that is the very site of Pompeii.
The youth of the protagonists – from parties to intimate moments – and the death of the victims of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, engraved in lava and myth, multiply the powers of evocation of situations whose realism is tinged with a very concrete magic. Rich in adventures, La Gradiva finds its impetus in the generous and restless way with which Marine Atlan films a beauty available to the violence of human relationships, which brings into existence a very full film and whose echoes last for a long time.
“Wonderful Mornings”, by Avril Besson (Special screenings)
This time, identity and appearances will be seen to be explicitly brought into play a little later. But from the outset, there is this character without very remarkable attributes and from whom a powerful poetic and comic radiance emanates. This is India Hair’s great talent, perceptible in many of the films in which she acts, but rarely so obviously and completely highlighted.
Charlie, the character she plays, has just found her old grandmother dead. We have to leave, she’s leaving. With disco vinyls in the trunk of his Volkswagen Beetle as a pretext and a former friend or perhaps lover of Mom’s as a very hypothetical recipient, there in a Mediterranean seaside resort, almost deserted out of season.
And there you have it. Not that nothing will happen in Wonderful Mornings. On the contrary, Charlie crosses paths with lots of succulent and endearing characters, starting with Marina (Raya Martigny), an adorable trans barmaid, and the impressive disco king from Cavalaire-sur-Mer (Var), played by Éric Cantona with a sense of burlesque that knows how to embrace grace.
Tourist resorts out of season definitely inspire young French cinema, after the Alpine mountains of Laurent in the wind (2025) and the Riviera beaches ofAffection affection (2026). That of the small Var town nourishes endearing encounters, which defy clichés to share smiles, songs and emotions. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s an impressive and very pleasing success, made up of incessant emergences and a willingness to embrace what would make life worth living.
“Farewell cruel world”, by Félix de Givry (Critics’ Week)
Here, the appearances are that Otto, no longer able to stand the harassment inflicted by some students in his third grade class, has ended his life. While the adults deal with this sad circumstance, it will take more to prevent Léna, who loves Otto, from putting in place what is necessary, and Otto from experiencing happy adventures on the banks of the English Channel, in a squat where a wise young man welcomes him.
It’s a fairly fantastic tale and at least as realistic, it thrills and intrigues. First film by Félix de Givry, Goodbye cruel world boldly and lightly goes through a long history of cinema dedicated to the end of childhood, listens to what resonates with courage and anguish in its young protagonists, often makes you smile.
Started with a chase, continued with an escape and trajectories which seek to invent the possibility of meeting, this first film also attentive to what circulates or is blocked in a small town today is the most promising of movements.
