The 2025 Cannes Film Festival was an edition particularly marked by high expectations; buzzy titles from festival regulars (Lynne Ramsay, Jafar Panahi, the Dardenne brothers, Joachim Trier) made just as many headlines in the weeks leading up to the festival as those names left off the final listing (Jim Jarmusch, or an ever-unconcerned Terrence Malick). But through it all, the 78th rendition of the world’s largest film festival was marked by the noticeable presence of faces that, until now, had never walked the glittery red steps of the Palais des Festivals to compete for the coveted Palme d’Or.

A Festival of Numbers

Of the 22 names (23 if we’re distinguishing between Belgian brothers) in competition, eight found themselves there for the first time, though few of them were entirely off festival delegate and head programmer Thierry Frémaux’s radar before now. (And, in that respect, none of them were debuting filmmakers, either.) Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa, whose sophomore feature Renoir cracked the lineup as one of the only Asian features competing, was already in Cannes for her first go-around in 2022, showcasing Plan 75 in the Un Certain Regard section; Bi Gan, whose Resurrection was an especially late addition to the lineup (announced within a week of the festival’s opening), had already wowed the Un Certain Regard section with his infamously meticulous Long Day’s Journey Into Night; South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus, a festival globetrotter, had already secured the Queer Palm in 2011 with his film Beauty well before returning to the Croisette for The History of Sound; Óliver Laxe, who stunned crowds early in the fest with the desert-bound Sirât, had found his way into three separate Cannes sidebars for his three prior films; French actor-turned-director Hafsia Herzi, meanwhile, brought her third film The Little Sister to compete after having had her first two in the Critics’ Week and Un Certain Regard sections.

Looking to the genuine Cannes first-timers making a splash in the most coveted lineup, German director Mascha Schilinski made an early impression with her explosively temporal second feature Sound of Falling, while Berlin regular Carla Simón joined an on-and-off tradition of Golden Bear winners making a direct beeline towards Palme contention, following up Alcarrás with the equally intimate Spanish portrait Romería. And then, of course, we have aspiring American ne’er-do-well Ari Aster, whose penchant for provocation (somehow) got him his first non-Sundance festival showcase of any kind with the trite and hollow COVID-era satire Eddington.

For one last look at competition numbers before getting into the nitty-gritty, the question of gender parity is one brought up every year when the lineup is announced that fateful early April morning, and for good reason: up until now, the highest proportion of woman directors to compete for the Palme d’Or in a single year came in 2023, when seven women entered the lineup of 21 filmmakers to create a notable but still unsatisfying 1/3 of the grouping. Now, two years later, the programmers have matched that number exactly, bringing in seven women once again, most of them first-time competitors mingling with the veterans: Hayakawa, Simón, Herzi and Schilinski joined returning champions Lynne Ramsay (Die, My Love), Kelly Reichardt (The Mastermind) and previous Palme victor Julia Ducournau (Alpha). (Ducournau remains one of only three women in the Palme winners’ club). With all that said, given the greater number of filmmakers overall (22 rather than 21 two years ago), the proportion on the whole appears slightly weaker, but at that point, one could argue that this is a matter of splitting hairs.

Politics on the Brain

As is typically the case, the Cannes competition lineup (and fret not; there will be discussion of other sections to come) was densely populated with films seeking to diagnose the heavy moments of political turmoil in which they were made, regardless of the period they may have been depicting. Such is the case for Reichardt, Sergei Loznitsa and critic-turned-director Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose respective The Mastermind, Two Prosecutors and The Secret Agent all took moments of great strife for their home regions (The United States, the former Soviet Union and Brazil) and utilized them as a microcosm for the ongoing destitution of the global political sphere. Reichardt’s view of a heist amid the backdrop of the Vietnam War applies the director’s expectedly languid subversions of genre convention to critique the bottomless pit of capitalism at a moment in time when the US was beginning to reckon with its complicity in atrocities on the other side of the world. Closer to home, Loznitsa once more turns towards Soviet-era Russia to depict bureaucracy as the plague on due process that we all know it to be, taking an almost farcical but unmistakably bleak view of a state so adept at sending you in circles that it discourages all attempts at justice before the ink has even dried on the paper. Mendonça, for his part, continues an increasingly common (but no less valuable) examination of Brazil’s period of military dictatorship to show how the institutions of education are often the first targets for an aspiring fascist regime to take hold of a population and turn all who fight for this basic right into unwilling enemies of the nation.

Elsewhere, films like Dominik Moll’s bland procedural Case 137 and Tarik Saleh’s equally forgettable Eagles of the Republic tackled political corruption under the respective banners of police brutality and state-sanctioned propaganda—and once again, the less said about Aster’s sorry excuse for a two-pronged satire of American political limpness, the better. But as ever, it was Iranian dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi who examined the modern state of his home nation to startling effect, earning the festival’s top prize for his efforts. (As many will point out, Panahi joins Robert Altman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Henri-Georges Clouzot as the only directors to have earned the Palme d’Or from Cannes, the Golden Lion from Venice and the Golden Bear from Berlin; Panahi and Antonioni hold the extra distinction of also winning Locarno’s Golden Leopard.)

With It Was Just An Accident, Panahi stepped entirely behind the camera for the first time in ages, shedding his recent fascination with autofiction as a means of coping with the repression he faced under the Iranian regime to return entirely to a fictional story no less based on the trauma of his experiences as a prisoner. The tale of a group of former political prisoners potentially faced with the option of confronting the man who made their imprisonment a life-altering Hell, It Was Just An Accident reaches the same sort of didactic conversational flow that marked last year’s Cannes standout The Seed of the Sacred Fig, but remains just as compelling not because it’s telling the West what we already want to hear about some faraway oppressive regime, but because Panahi (like Mohammad Rasoulof last year), expresses these ideas with a human urgency matched by a tight command of genre to ensure than nobody is left ambivalent to the questions that plague these characters’ minds, just as they plague those of the filmmakers and, by extension, the audience.

This reality makes for an interesting contrast against the Cannes competition’s second Iranian feature, Saeed Roustaee’s Woman and Child; after wowing the 2022 crowd with his criminally underseen family drama Leila’s Brothers, Roustaee was greeted in his achievements by an expected reprimand by the local government for refusing to clear the film for approval before its festival bow. Sentenced to a brief prison stint and forced to take a local film course to produce cinema more “aligned with national interests and national morality,” Roustaee’s return to Cannes seemed to go off without a hitch; this film’s production was cleared by the Iranian government, and viewing it, one can’t help but notice certain regressive ideas at play such as the continued depiction of women wearing hijabs at all times. As a film, Woman and Child acts as a towering and committed melodrama—made to work primarily thanks to an explosively magnetic Parinaz Izadyar and an ever-reliable Payman Maadi—but in light of what Panahi’s victory represents for himself and the people of Iran, this contrast in production remains worth noting.

Fortnight Familiarity

When discussing politics at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, it would be futile not to mention, at least in passing, one of the biggest question marks going into the event, itself punctuated with forceful exclamation. Stepping away from the competition lineup after having won the 2021 Jury Prize for Ahed’s Knee, Israeli troublemaker Nadav Lapid entered the parallel Director’s Fortnight sidebar with the ferocious and furious Yes!, a film that depicts a post-October 7th moment in which a musician is tasked with writing a new Israeli national anthem. Given Lapid’s career-long frustration with his own nationality and what it means, Yes! finds the filmmaker at his most directly indignant with what the settler nation he calls home has done in the wake of an escalating slaughter; if Lapid’s willingness to work within the Israeli system has, until now, cast doubt on his willingness to fully sever himself from the enactors of an ongoing genocide, then his latest film is the knife sharpened with his own ballistic grief, essentially taking Israeli money to pay for a mirror that reflects an ugly violence beyond redemption, perhaps even for himself.

Otherwise, the Fortnight section proved relatively quiet (a frequent occurrence in the past few years since the change in leadership that has seen a greater focus on new names than established authors), but one more film in the sidebar that turned heads prior to its release came from another Berlin regular making his Cannes debut: Christian Petzold with Mirrors No. 3. In the same light as Lapid’s powder-keg of a stylistic showcase, the German filmmaker’s intimate portrait of a family unit in longstanding, silent discord may read as inconsequential, but even with Petzold’s usual firmness of form, Mirrors No. 3 would likely appear slight regardless of who or what it found itself standing next to. A solid rendition of ultimately familiar material, the film’s reliance on Petzold’s latest muse Paula Beer is well-founded in the actor’s ability to communicate so much of Petzold’s anguish without speaking, but too much of that anguish is left for short-burst revelations that add up to little more than the occasional beauty of sparsity, as if presented with a jigsaw puzzle that assembles into an image of a black square.

Un Certain Standout

As is so often the case, rumblings surrounded this year’s festival painted an image of a competition lineup overshadowed by the second-rung sidebar that is the “Un Certain Regard” section—dedicated to the platforming of unique new voices. This time around, though, those new voices came in the form of some familiar faces; no less than three first-time directors in the Un Certain Regard section were famous Hollywood actors taking their first spin behind the camera rather than in front of it. And while most praise has been doled out for Kristen Stewart—whose adaptation of Lidia Yuknavich’s memoir The Chronology of Water is boldly ephemeral and challenging, if somewhat beholden to snippets of arthouse cinema clichés—the true standout of the section, and of the entire festival, has to be Harris Dickinson, hunky star of previous Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness.

For his own directorial outing Urchin, Dickinson draws obvious but entirely fitting parallels with Mike Leigh’s classic Naked, as an exploration of homelessness in the UK rendered challenging for audience attachment—and therefore all the more admirable and rewarding in its scope—by a subject whose self-written path of destruction is exacerbated by a system that wants nothing to do with him after a brief “We Tried” shrug. Frank Dillane’s lead performance exists in an entirely different tonal register to that of David Thewlis in Leigh’s masterpiece—more aloof than venomously self-righteous—but the existential pessimism of both men exists as a through-line that enables Dickinson to shuffle his way through the British welfare network and examine how a “one person at a time” approach, noble as it may be, can only change so much when the symptom persists without a real political diagnosis.

Last but certainly least, Scarlett Johansson made her own debut in this arena with the ironically titled (though certainly not by design) Eleanor the Great. A perfectly watchable but entirely visionless affair—a particular head-scratcher for a festival section specifically dedicated to distinct artistic perspectives—Johansson’ pedestrian filmmaking rests entirely on the casual charisma of 95-year-old sensation June Squibb and her effortless magnetism in the face of a narrative whose dime-a-dozen structure is only upended by its curious subject matter: that of a woman who pretends to have been a victim of the Holocaust. By far the most Sundance film to appear in Cannes in 2025, Eleanor the Great is likely, due to its unwillingness to dive into the thornier elements of its subject matter, best-suited to be remembered as a film we’ll all quickly forget.

Elsewhere…

Finally, it might be best to end this discussion of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival with a brief overview of its most recently added section, Cannes Premiere. Debuting with the 2021 edition of the festival, the meaning behind this sidebar has been left to speculation ever since; the festival attests that it’s a spotlight for more established filmmakers, while cynics profess it to be a cheap ploy to poach potential titles away from other festivals. I, myself, see it as something in the middle, showcasing films from names that the Croisette is always eager to welcome back, but doesn’t have the confidence to spotlight in a competitive sphere.

This much, it seemed, was clear enough with the lineup this year in particular, which boasted past Cannes attendees like Fatih Akin, Raoul Peck and Kirill Serebrennikov. Since its founding, though, the Cannes Premiere section seems to often highlight at least one film whose exclusion from the main competition lineup is especially baffling; the most obvious culprit came in 2023 with Víctor Erice’s long-awaited return to cinema Close Your Eyes, and this year, many might point to the unexpected Croisette return of famed Filipino rule-breaker Lav Diaz, whose Magellan welcomed him back to Cannes for the second-ever time, likely because of its unexpected accessibility. (The film is in colour—only his third time ever doing so—stars a name actor in Gael García Bernal playing a famous European figure, and, most startling of all, only just barely crosses 2½ hours in length; by Diaz standards, that may as well be an interlude, which might even be the case as the film is allegedly only a portion of a nine-hour cut currently in post.)

Alas, while this change of pace (in every sense but the pacing) proved a welcome return for Diaz—who found himself distilling his career-log fascination with the colonization of the Philippines to its most direct lineage ever—this year’s Cannes Premiere standout was undoubtedly Hlynur Pálmason’s Icelandic family odyssey The Love That Remains. Featuring a bottled cast of characters on a remote landscape overlooking the sea and hills, Pálmason utilizes his typically clinical shooting style and preference for unpacking familial discord to explore one year in the life of a clan undergoing divorce. The catch, though, is that the filmmaker is, for the first time, sidestepping his usual bleakness in favour of a disarmingly funny and often surreal experience. Finding the humour in interpersonal strife (and the presence of a Palm Dog-winning pooch who absolutely steals every frame of the film), The Love That Remains makes a compelling case for Pálmason’s worth in the big leagues, even if Cannes (which has thus far platformed all but his debut film), has yet to fully see it that way.

To say that the 2025 Cannes Film Festival was one of the most explosive and memorable editions of recent years would certainly be a stretch—it will likely be a good long while before Frémaux and gang manage to top the magic they pulled two years ago when featuring the likes of The Zone of Interest, May December, Perfect Days, About Dry Grasses and, of course, Killers of the Flower Moon—but there remains no shortage of worthy features sure to set cinema ablaze over the course of the next year. In a moment when name artists brushed elbows with up-and-comers, the Croisette once more proved an imperfect but unavoidable space to plant the flag of what cinema has always been, and set its sights on where cinema is headed in the years to come.

Volume 29, Issue 6 / June 2025 Festival Reports   ari aster   cannes festival   jafar panahi   kristen stewart