How the Cannes 2026 films reflect a world in conflict
Various works explore the impact of authoritarianism through a historical lens, while one thriller on corruption is set in Putin's Russia. The 2026 Cannes Film
Various works explore the impact of authoritarianism through a historical lens, while one thriller on corruption is set in Putin's Russia. The 2026 Cannes Film Festival, it seems, has war on its mind. An extraordinary number of movies at this year's festival, which concludes on May 23, deal with the experience of life in wartime. In Lukas Dhont's Belgian World War I drama "Coward," young soldiers in the trenches confront ideas of heroism and masculinity. "Visitation," the latest film from Volker Schlöndorff ("The Tin Drum"), continues the German director's obsession with World War II and its aftermath, tracing the fate of three families living on a lake near Berlin through decades of turbulent history, from the rise of Adolf Hitler until the fall of the Berlin Wall. There are two French films — "Moulin" and "De Gaulle: Tilting Iron" — about French resistance to Nazi occupation, while another movie, "A Man of His Time," takes a rare look at French collaboration during wartime. These films, like all historical movies, are really about now. The rise of the far right across Europe has spooked European filmmakers and they're looking to the past to find answers, to tell stories about how a nation falls prey to fascism, and how people behave under authoritarian rule: some bravely, heroically, others craven and self-serving. These films are all concerned with the damage war does to the psyche, with the historic trauma wrought on those who take part in the killing and on those who look away.
An original, modern take on history Of the wartime movies, "A Man of His Time," from director Emmanuel Marre, is the most original, and the most bracing. Ostensibly a period piece, the film is shot like a grungy indie flick with 20-somethings in vintage costumes talking and behaving like Gen Zs as they kowtow to Nazi authority as a way to get ahead. 'A Man of His Time' inventively portrays the gears the fascism through a portrait of a Vichy collaborator Image: Kidam & Michigan films Swann Arlaud, who played Sandra Hüller's lawyer in the Oscar-nominated "Anatomy of a Fall," is an unknown author and shameless social climber determined to make a career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Marre based him on his own great-grandfather, who chose to work for the fascist Vichy regime. The director's modern take on the historic tale can be jarring — dropping in '80s-era hits like "Life is Life" from Opus or Alphaville's "Sounds like a Melody" over '40s-era images — but his message on the banality, and the maliciousness, of evil could not be more timely. Thomas and Erika Mann on a post-Holocaust road trip Pawel Pawlikowski's "Fatherland" is a postwar movie. The German-language drama from the Polish director of "Ida" and "Cold War" follows Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning German writer, and his daughter, novelist and anti-fascist activist Erika Mann, as they embark on a road trip across divided Germany during the Cold War.
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