The 2026 Cannes Film Festival has drawn a wide range of filmmakers, with several directors presenting new work in competition or announcing major new projects from the market.
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski brought "Fatherland" to the Main Competition. The film follows German author Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika as they travel back to post-World War II Germany in 1949 to receive an award. It stars Hanns Zischler as Thomas Mann and Sandra Hüller as Erika. At a Friday press conference, Pawlikowski explained why he chose to set the film in the past rather than engage with the present day.
"I am lost today," he said. "I have no idea what period we are in. That's why I did a period film."
Hüller, who plays a German woman living in the shadow of the Nazi era for the second time in her career, addressed a question about whether she carries guilt in those roles. "I understand that question," she said. "Yes, I feel the guilt every day. And also, I never get bored of it, to feel the guilt, because it's necessary in order to act right."
Pawlikowski told the press conference he made significant changes to the historical record, including replacing Mann's wife Katia with daughter Erika as the key companion for dramatic reasons, and adjusting the timeline of a key death that appears in the film.
French-Israeli filmmaker Arthur Harari also has a film in competition: "The Unknown," a body-swap drama adapted from a graphic novel he wrote with his brother Lucas. The film opens on David, a Jewish Frenchman played by Niels Schneider, who switches bodies with a woman played by Léa Seydoux during an intimate encounter. Harari, who won an Oscar as co-writer of Justine Triet's "Anatomy of a Fall," said the film grows from a lifelong preoccupation with identity.
"All of my films focus on identity," Harari told IndieWire. "Here, I make that idea very direct: The body switch works like a mirror. I don't treat the film as an intellectual or conceptual exercise. I approach it more playfully: How does a film about someone closer to myself work with a woman at the center?"
German director Valeska Grisebach returned to Cannes for the first time since 2017 with "The Dreamed Adventure," a slow-burning crime thriller closing out the festival on May 22. The film follows an archaeologist near the Bulgarian-Greek-Turkish border who becomes entangled in a war between rival criminal gangs. Grisebach, who works with amateur actors and shoots without a conventional script, told The Hollywood Reporter that her working methods have made financing difficult.
"That happens to me constantly," she said, "even though I've already made several films without a conventionally written screenplay, it still irritates [funders]. I hope one day that changes for me."
Away from the competition, BAFTA-winning Indian director Shekhar Kapur announced at the Cannes market that he will direct "Foreign Bodies," a historical biopic about Waldemar Haffkine, a Ukrainian-Jewish bacteriologist whose cholera and plague vaccines helped save millions of lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The British Raj later falsely accused Haffkine of killing nineteen people from tetanus in what became known as "the Second Dreyfus Affair." Kapur, whose credits include the seven-time Oscar-nominated "Elizabeth," described the project in sweeping terms.
"Foreign Bodies is a large-scale character drama about a man caught at the intersection of epidemic, empire, prejudice and faith," Kapur told Deadline. "This is a story of such epic scale, yet of such personal and internal conflict, of a man who saved millions of lives, becoming both worshiped as a God and reviled as the devil."
Casting discussions are currently underway, with producers on the ground at Cannes to meet with potential partners.
