Pedro Almodóvar stood before the Cannes press that morning wearing a “Free Palestine” pin on his lapel and called Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin “monsters.” “As Europeans,” he said, “we are obliged to become a kind of shield against these monsters.”
He was not the first at this year’s festival to name names: Spanish actor Javier Bardem had attacked the same three leaders’ “toxic masculinity” days earlier. The festival opened on 12 May with Peter Jackson receiving an honorary Palme d’Or and festival president Iris Knobloch invoking Cannes’ founding in 1939 as proof that bringing artists together in crisis “was not a luxury, it was a necessity.” The mood has not lifted since.
That matters because Cannes still likes to imagine itself as the place where cinema speaks first and politics follows after. The 79th edition is making that order harder to sustain. Artificial intelligence is hanging over industry conversations, war has entered the competition directly, and directors are now saying openly that silence itself has become political.
War Reaches the Competition
The clearest sign of the festival’s mood is on screen.
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, a French-Latvian-German co-production and his first film made outside Russia, has been described by AP as sending “shock waves” through the competition. The film centres on a Russian shipping executive asked to contribute 150 of his workers to the military mobilisation of February 2022, while simultaneously investigating his wife’s suspected infidelity.
As AP noted, the family drama darkens steadily into a portrait of corruption and state coercion in wartime Russia. Zvyagintsev, who has been based in Paris since the invasion, told reporters: “It was important for me to make this film given the current Russian context.”
That gives Cannes a more serious centre than some recent editions have managed. The competition, which includes 22 films across three continents and five female directors, has no obvious studio-backed frontrunner. South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook presides over the jury. The strongest conversation is not about dresses or standing ovations. It is about how directly the competition is allowing history to enter the frame.
AI Stops Being a Side Debate
The other subject shaping the festival is artificial intelligence.
Demi Moore, serving as a juror this year, told Cannes it was pointless to treat AI as something the industry could simply defeat, arguing instead that filmmakers had to find ways to work with it whilst protecting themselves. That line captures the new mood well. AI is no longer being discussed as a novelty or a scandal from elsewhere. It has become part of the professional weather.
This matters because Cannes usually helps the film world decide which anxieties are passing and which are structural. The fact that AI has become one of the dominant talking points suggests the industry now accepts that the question is not whether the technology will stay but how much authorship, labour, and visual trust it will disturb on the way.
Cannes still markets itself through old rituals: the carpet, the jury, the Palais, the long queue for prestige. AI belongs to a different logic of speed, scale, and synthetic abundance. When those two worlds meet on the Croisette, the resulting tension starts to look like a fight over whether cinema remains a crafted art or becomes one more content stream with better branding.
Directors Stop Pretending
The festival’s political pressure is not coming only from subject matter.
It is also coming from filmmakers who are less willing to perform neutrality. Almodóvar’s press conference today was the sharpest example, but not an isolated one. More than 380 signatories, including Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, and Almodóvar himself, published an open letter in Libération and Variety before the festival opened, condemning what they called genocide in Gaza and demanding that Cannes take a position. The institution has not done so. The pressure has not gone away.
For years, Cannes benefited from strategic ambiguity. It could host politically charged films whilst letting the institution itself appear above the argument. That balance is getting harder to maintain. Almodóvar put it plainly: “Silence and fear are a very bad sign; they are a sign of the erosion of democracy.” Once directors begin saying that publicly at press conferences, the festival can no longer pretend that politics enters only through the films and leaves before the cocktails.
Prestige Feels Less Certain
There is another reason the 79th edition feels unusually exposed.
The competition arrived without major American studio weight: 65 per cent of competition films come from France, Japan, and Spain, with only one US film in the entire race, Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love. That can be creatively liberating, but it also leaves the festival with less borrowed certainty. When no single title dominates and no major American machine anchors the programme, Cannes has to rely more heavily on the seriousness of its own curatorial instinct.
In one sense that is good news: a thinner Hollywood presence gives more room to independent and international cinema. In another, it makes the festival’s political atmosphere impossible to dismiss as side noise. If Cannes is not being carried by obvious commercial heavyweights, then its identity depends more directly on what it claims about artistic importance and cultural leadership. Those claims are now being tested by war, AI, and open disagreement about the duties of artists.
That may be the real story of Cannes 79. Not that politics has invaded the festival, because politics was always there. The difference is that this year it no longer sits tidily at the edge of the frame. War supplies the urgency, AI supplies the anxiety, and directors like Almodóvar supply the bluntness that institutions tend to avoid. Cannes still has the old ingredients: stars, premieres, ovations, Riviera ritual. The 79th edition feels less like a sanctuary from the world than a test of whether cinema can still speak clearly inside it. That is a heavier burden than glamour can carry on its own.
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