Sphaera: Edition #9

Welcome to SPHAERA’s special Cannes Edition.

A limited number of physical copies of SPHAERA Magazine will be available at the Palais for those lucky few making the pilgrimage to the Cannes Film Festival this week.

By Eric Kohn

Sorry, Oscar: Nothing excites a filmmaker more than the Palme d’Or. When Sweden’s Ruben Östlund became the ninth director in history to win the Cannes prize twice for Triangle of Sadness (and previously The Square), he immediately announced his goal of bagging a third one. His latest dark comedy, The Entertainment System is Down, wasn’t ready for this year’s edition, which means Östlund’s quest will have to wait another year.

The competition, however, waits for no one: Each year brings another slew of Palme d’Or contenders from around the world and the currency of the prize has only gone up in recent years. While the Berlinale’s Golden Bear and Venice’s Golden Lion carry plenty of weight on their own, nothing can touch the prestige of the Palme d’Or. But why?

Since 2019, each of the Palme winners left the festival with an elevated profile that carried through the end of the year, and in most cases, set it up for future awards season glory: From Parasite, the first (and so far only) non-English language Best Picture winner, through Anora and It Was Just an Accident, the Palme d’Or establishes movies that benefit from the long runway of the year ahead. Additionally, thanks to a recent rule change by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, any movie that wins the Palme d’Or automatically qualifies for the Oscars. Get anointed as cinema royalty in May, relaunch with an elevated profile in the fall, and presto: Prestige glory in a nutshell.

This helps explain why U.S. distributor NEON, one of the most prominent distributors of international films in America, tends to go Palme hunting each year. The company has released the past six winners and has a number of contenders this year to put it in contention for a seventh.

For all this excitement, the Palme d’Or also tends to put American cinema in its place. Hollywood is a billion-dollar industry, but the art form thrives well beyond the studio system, and the Palme d’Or provides that reminder each year. When Cannes announced its 2026 lineup in April, there was only one American film in its venerated competition. A few days later, it added a second. That means the 79th edition of the world’s most glamorous film festival turns to two established directors to represent the entirety of U.S. cinema in the Palme d’Or race this year: Ira Sachs, whose musical fantasy The Man I Love stars Rami Malek, and James Gray’s Paper Tiger, a crime drama featuring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller.

Studios are reluctant to play the Palme game. Last year’s two frontrunners for Best Picture came from Warner Bros. — One Battle After Another and Sinners — bypassed the festival circuit entirely, and the studio’s latest auteur effort from Alejandro G. Iñarritu, Digger, may surface in the fall with Cannes favorite Tom Cruise in tow. When studios do take advantage of Cannes spotlight, it usually happens in an out-of-competition slot, where the international media response can help elevate the European release.

Competition also makes it tough for big streamers, particularly Netflix, to make an appearance. A few years ago, the festival mandated that all the films in competition were required to have a theatrical presence in France, where all films must remain in theaters for 15 months before going to streaming. That’s at least one reason why The Adventures of Cliff Booth, starring Brad Pitt as his stuntman character from Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, won’t make an appearance. While Hollywood hit the competition in 2019, the sequel — written by Tarantino and directed by David Fincher — was a Netflix production scheduled for release this fall.

All of this means that a blend of practical considerations tend to make the splashiest American offerings wary of a competition slot, even if programmers deem it worthy of one. Considering that Cannes is famous for Hollywood stars prancing across its red carpet, the dearth of American movies in the festival’s most prominent section might strike some armchair observers as unusual, but it’s actually tied to what makes Cannes — and, by extension, the race for the Palme d’Or — such a singular presence in contemporary cinema.

It’s a full circle moment for the competition. In 1955, the year that the festival first dispensed the “Golden Palm” as its top prize, there were also two American films in competition: The delicate Ernest Borgnine drama Marty (which won) and the rare Bing Crosby/Grace Kelly drama The Country Girl (for which Kelly would later win an Oscar). Everything else was global, just like this year.

While there are many prestigious film festivals that serve a similar function, only Cannes has projected the necessary elitism that has made its competition into such a coveted destination. Most filmmakers will tell you that any section of Cannes is an exciting place to gain entry, but diehard Cannes fans scrutinize the competition above all. A true competition film, after all, deserves the distinction of Palme d’Or contention.

As for everything else: Well, there’s ample Cannes prestige to go around. In 1962, the independent sidebar Critics’ Week was born in an effort to expand the range of films on offer to showcase newer voices. Six years later, in the midst of political unrest, several French New Wave filmmakers added the Directors’ Fortnight, in an effort to broaden the curatorial identity of Cannes to more daring, even avant-garde possibilities. Previous festival director Gilles Jacob created the Un Certain Regard section in 1978 to create more space for lower-profile critical darlings that were slipping away to these newer sections. And in the early ‘90s, the ACID section brought an effort to showcase more low-budget, independent efforts.

At the end of the day, all Cannes sections feed into the larger perception of the festival program, so much that the official festival includes these discrete sidebars in its printed lineup. That decision is a statement of confidence that no matter the density of the program unfolding across 10 days on the Croisette, nothing dominates the Croisette more than the race for the Palme d’Or.

For this section alone, a jury of high-profile filmmakers and actors walk the red carpet two and sometimes three times a day, as the Lumiere Theater premiere levels the playing field. This year, the A-list casts of The Man I Love and Paper Tiger will enter the same venue as globally-celebrated auteurs such as Oscar-winning Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Fatherland) and Korean fixture NA Hong-Jin (Hope). Intentionally or not, the arrangement of these films tell a compelling story about the strength of the art form when exposed to the most discerning audience in the world. Cannes regulars love to deliver epic standing ovations (and the occasional boos) to let their voices be heard. Critics are so merciless that Cannes had to introduce an embargo a few years ago to ensure that red carpet premieres wouldn’t be overshadowed by the media reaction.

More often than not, the erratic news cycle is part of the fun (though it may have spooked some studios from bringing their higher-profile premieres). With nearly 3,000 seats in the Lumiere, journalists and critics from around the world tend to react to films differently depending on their own countries of origin and sensibilities. The response to competition ends up being as much a part of the competition as the films themselves.

The competition also helps illustrate the ongoing globalization of the film industry. In the U.S., conversations about tariffs and tax incentives provide constant reminders that many English-language productions turn to more welcoming destinations. Yes, there are only two American movies at Cannes this year — but there are more Hollywood actors, including Sebastian Stan (a Romanian-born American) in Romanian Palme d’Or winner Mungiu’s drama Fjord, as well as British stars Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander in the alien invasion action-drama Hope, a Korean production. Fatherland features Sandra Huller, currently lighting up screens in the biggest blockbuster of the year so far, Project Hail Mary.

Other sections at Cannes this year may deliver surprises from up-and-comers, where America has better representation. Un Certain Regard opens with Jane Schoenbrun’s eerie meta-horror movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and includes additional American entries from comic actor-director Jordan Firstman (Club Kid) as well as the gothic thriller Victorian Psycho, featuring Maika Monroe.

No matter what pans out for these titles, though, at the end of the 10-day event all eyes will be on the main competition jury, this year headed by Korean genre auteur Park Chan-wook. It’s a delicate process. Jurors have been cautioned not to spread gossip during the festival, which can travel like wildfire through the Cannes party circuit.

Each juror gets one vote, but the president guides the conversation, and it can lead to any number of consensus choices. That’s why No Country for Old Men was shut out in 2007, the same year that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly lost to Romania’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. Ten years ago, critics loved Toni Erdmann, but jury president George Miller didn’t — and instead handed British director Ken Loach his second Palme d’Or for the socially-conscious drama I, Daniel Blake.

The 2017 AIDS drama BPM (Beats Per Minute) was a favorite of jury president Pedro Almodovar — but not fellow juror Will Smith, who pushes the conversation elsewhere, yielding Ruben Östlund’s first Palme d’Or win for The Square. He scored his second five years later from jury president Vincent Lindon.

Because the race is subject to the whims of a few people, it tends to defy betting markets and even the most diehard Cannes prognosticators. It also sometimes leads to messiness at the awards show. The most memorable climax to the Palme d’Or race came in 2021 (one year after the festival was canceled due to the pandemic). Jury president Spike Lee prematurely announced at the start of the ceremony that Julia Ducournau’s surrealist body horror thriller Titane won, and then, realizing his mistake, had to announce a lesser prize while the winning director sat there for another hour waiting for her big moment. If that happened at the Oscars, it would be seen as a major screwup. At Cannes, it was part of the fun.

Ducournau’s victory marked only the second time in history that a woman won the Palme d’Or, following Jane Campion’s win for The Piano (which she split with Farewell My Concubine). This achievement was quickly followed by Justine Triet’s 2023 win for Anatomy of a Fall, which went on to land her a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. While Cannes certainly has expanded the scope of films and filmmakers welcomed to the party, these recent strides primarily reflect the overall industry gradually becoming more welcoming to women directors.

In other words, the Palme d’Or race is a mirror that reflects the state of filmmaking worldwide, funneled through the whims of curatorial preferences, and designed to make the case for the ongoing relevance of cinema in an ever-changing world. Other sections provide plenty of gems, and the addition of newer sections like Cannes Premiere speaks to the festival’s desire to accommodate virtually all movies worth showing on a big screen. Sometimes, a major movie stands out in another section and everyone wonders why it didn’t wind up in competition. Cannes is a well-oiled machine, not a perfect one.

But the sense of purpose keeps many of us returning time and again. It’s a platform for movies designed to argue that they matter and deserve celebration in the most spectacular circumstances possible. Even the feuds among critics about whether certain movies “belong” in competition feed into the grand scheme in play.

The competition carries a perspective that should be relevant to all cinephiles. Around the world, theaters fight for their survival, the economics of filmmaking remain in constant flux, and newer generations face a world dominated by many smaller screens. Regardless of how much cinema struggles for attention on the world stage, the Palme d’Or race makes the case that they’re still worth fighting for.

Stay tuned for more articles from our special Cannes Edition…