Each spring, the city of Cannes becomes the gravitational center of the cinematic world. From May 12 to 23, 2026, the 79th Cannes Film Festival will unfold along the famed red carpet of the Palais des Festivals, beneath a haze of camera flashes, whispered names, and deliberate elegance. Since 1946, this iconic event has celebrated cinema in all its forms — poised between glamour and artistic ambition, between spectacle and conscience, between global premieres and intimate discoveries.
Beneath the palm-lined Croisette, filmmakers from every continent present their work in search of recognition or revelation. The Official Selection — from the main Competition to Un Certain Regard, from Special Screenings to Short Films — reflects the vitality of cinema today: bold aesthetics, urgent narratives, and singular voices that cross borders and defy expectations. Each screening, whether it takes place in the Lumière Theater or under the stars at the open-air beach cinema, feels suspended in time — a communion of image and audience.
Cannes is not only a celebration, but a marketplace. The Marché du Film, the largest of its kind, brings together producers, distributors, agents, and journalists in a constant hum of negotiation and possibility. Behind closed doors and along sunlit promenades, the future of film takes shape — in contracts, in promises, in chance encounters.
And yet the soul of Cannes remains elsewhere: in the tension between the secrecy of an unknown film and the burst of light as it is unveiled to the world. It lives in the quiet before a standing ovation, in the walk from hotel lobby to screening room, in the eyes of a young director awaiting her first review. Cannes is not merely about watching films — it is about inhabiting the rhythm of an art form in full metamorphosis.
For eleven days, Cannes becomes more than a city. It becomes a stage, a crossroads, and, for many, a form of cinema itself — ephemeral, dazzling, and unforgettable.