by InTrieste
At the 2026 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the conversation centered on a slate of films that balanced intimate human drama with bold experimentation — a lineup that critics across the board described as one of the festival’s strongest in recent years.
Leading the pack was Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, which won the Palme d’Or. Starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, the film follows a Romanian-Norwegian couple rebuilding their lives in an isolated village, offering a stark meditation on faith, identity, and belonging. Critics praised the film’s emotional precision and moral complexity.
Among the festival’s most acclaimed titles was All of a Sudden from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, marking the director’s first feature made entirely outside Japan. Set in Paris, the film explores the evolving relationship between an elder care director and a Japanese theater artist, earning some of the highest review scores of the festival season.
Other standout competition titles included Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved (El ser querido), a sharp family drama starring Javier Bardem as a domineering filmmaker opposite Victoria Luengo, and The Black Ball (La Bola Negra) by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, an ambitious queer epic featuring Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close across intersecting timelines.
Outside the main competition, several titles generated significant buzz. Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s Ben’Imana, set in Rwanda, won the Caméra d’Or for best first feature, while Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasmaemerged as one of the festival’s breakout sensations in the Un Certain Regard section — a surreal genre hybrid starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, also in Un Certain Regard, brought a lighter tone with a chaotic and unexpectedly tender story of fatherhood and reinvention.
For InTrieste, this year’s festival carried an added sense of pride. The Un Certain Regard jury included Laura Samani, whose presence made following Cannes especially meaningful for our magazine.
As the festival circuit moves toward theatrical releases, audiences in Italy — and particularly in Friuli Venezia Giulia — will be hoping many of these celebrated titles soon arrive on local screens.
