The 79th Festival de Cannes brings a full slate of premieres to its various venues on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, spanning competition titles, special screenings, animation, and classic restorations. Here is a rundown of what is showing today.
1. Ben’Imana Un Certain Regard | Debussy Theatre | 11h00 – 12h41 Directed by Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, this entry in the Un Certain Regard section opens the day’s programming at the Debussy Theatre. The film marks one of the section’s more anticipated debuts from an emerging African voice in world cinema.
Set in Rwanda in 2012, the film follows Vénéranda, a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi who has rebuilt her life around reconciliation and community healing. Her fragile sense of stability is shaken when her teenage daughter becomes pregnant, triggering painful memories and unresolved tensions linked to the past. The film also carries historic weight: it is the first Rwandan film to screen at the Cannes Film Festival.
2. Le Corset (Iron Boy) Un Certain Regard | Debussy Theatre | 14h00 – 15h29 Louis Clichy’s animated feature screens in the afternoon under Un Certain Regard. The film’s distinctive visual style, drawing from graphic novel aesthetics, has drawn early attention ahead of its Cannes premiere.
In rural France, Christophe, age 10, tries to live up to his rigid and distant father on the family farm. When the young boy starts to lean over and collapse without warning, a doctor prescribes an iron corset to keep him upright. Forced to reinvent his life away from the farm, Christophe discovers a new passion for music and meets a new friend. The French animated feature is directed by Louis Clichy, a Pixar alum who worked on films like WALL-E and Up before making two animated Asterix features.
3. Homepage La Cinef | Buñuel Theatre | 14h30 – 15h56 Directed by Clara Vieira, this La Cinef selection screens at the Buñuel Theatre. La Cinef is the festival’s dedicated section for films produced in film schools, spotlighting the next generation of filmmakers.
A group of teenagers gathers for a camping trip. While two of them try to define their romantic relationship, they are surprised by a swarm of fireflies that leads them deep into the forest.
4. Minotaur In Competition – Feature Films | Grand Théâtre Lumière | 15h30 – 17h50 One of the day’s most closely watched titles, Andreï Zviaguintsev’s Minotaur competes in the main competition. The Russian director, known for his sparse and psychologically layered work, brings his latest feature to the Grand Théâtre Lumière in what is expected to be among the stronger Palme d’Or contenders.
Set against the backdrop of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the film follows broken business executive Gleb, who discovers his wife Galina has been unfaithful. As Gleb finds himself under siege from mounting corporate pressures and an increasingly unstable world, the collapse of his carefully ordered life accelerates toward violence. The film is a loose adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller The Unfaithful Wife, co-written with Simon Lyashenko, and marks Zviaguintsev’s return to features after nearly a decade.
5. Lucy Lost Special Screenings | Agnès Varda Theatre | 16h30 – 17h59 Olivier Clert’s animated feature screens as part of the festival’s Special Screenings programme at the Agnès Varda Theatre. The film’s painterly animation style has been noted in early festival coverage.
Adapted from Listen to the Moon by British author Michael Morpurgo, the animated film follows Lucy, a mysterious girl with visions no one else can see, who meets her secret friend Milly. Together, they set out on a magical quest to uncover the secret behind her mysterious powers.
6. The Stranger Cannes Classics | Buñuel Theatre | 16h45 – 18h20 Orson Welles’ 1946 noir thriller returns to Cannes under the festival’s Classics restoration programme. The Buñuel Theatre screens the film as part of a broader effort to reintroduce landmark works of cinema history to festival audiences.
A Cannes Classics restoration of Orson Welles’ 1946 noir thriller, in which a Nazi war criminal attempts to hide his identity in a quiet American town — only to be pursued by a government investigator closing in on the truth. The film screens as part of the festival’s ongoing effort to restore and reintroduce landmark works of cinema history to audiences.
7. Amarga Navidad In Competition – Feature Films | Grand Théâtre Lumière | 19h00 – 20h52 Pedro Almodóvar brings his latest competition entry to the Grand Théâtre Lumière in the evening’s most prominent slot. The Spanish auteur, a perennial presence at Cannes, screens what is shaping up to be one of the festival’s most discussed in-competition titles.
Raúl is a cult filmmaker in the midst of a creative crisis. When tragedy strikes one of his closest collaborators, he draws inspiration from it to write his next film. Little by little, he imagines Elsa, a filmmaker in the midst of writing her own story — until the lines between Raúl’s fiction and Elsa’s reality begin to blur. The film incorporates elements of autofiction and competes for the Palme d’Or.
8. Le Triangle d’Or Special Screenings | Agnès Varda Theatre | 19h15 – 20h45 Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz’s film screens as a Special Screening at the Agnès Varda Theatre. The title joins a lineup of non-competition works selected for their distinct perspective and cinematic ambition.
To make ends meet, Laura takes a job working for Souria in a grand mansion in Paris’ Golden Triangle. Installed there by her lover, a wealthy Saudi prince, Souria lives in anticipation of his visits. As Laura adapts to this world of outsized luxury and constant surveillance, a fragile bond forms between the two women — but Laura senses that a danger looms over Souria, and that the gilded cage may close around them both. The film marks the feature debut of Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz and is based on her own real-life experiences.
9. Homepage Cannes Classics | Buñuel Theatre | 19h30 – 20h32 A separate Cannes Classics presentation screens at the Buñuel Theatre in the evening, this time under the direction of Jia Zhang-Ke, the acclaimed Chinese filmmaker whose work has been a fixture in the festival’s retrospective and classics programming.
A woman travels from southern China to Turin in northern Italy, to see her husband. But an unexpected departure leaves her to find herself again – and to find cinema.
10. Kokurojo (The Samurai and the Prisoner) Cannes Premiere | Debussy Theatre | 20h00 – 22h27 Kiyoshi Kurosawa closes out the night with his samurai drama at the Debussy Theatre. The Japanese director, whose body of work spans genre and art cinema, receives a Cannes Premiere designation for what is among the evening’s most anticipated screenings.
When Lord Murashige Araki rises up against the tyrannical Nobunaga Oda, he finds himself besieged within the walls of his own castle. Isolated, he is confronted with a series of mysterious crimes that shatter the fragile order of his court, plunging the fortress into fear and suspicion. With Oda’s army closing in and a traitor hiding among his ranks, Murashige is forced into an uneasy alliance with Kanbei Kuroda, a brilliant yet dangerous strategist held prisoner in the dungeon. The film marks Kurosawa’s first attempt at a sweeping samurai period feature and is adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s award-winning novel.
Taken together, May 19’s lineup reflects the breadth that has long defined Cannes as a festival, a single day that moves from debut African filmmakers and animated features to restored Hollywood classics and heavyweight competition titles from some of the world’s most established directors. The slate cuts across continents, generations, and genres, placing emerging voices alongside veterans of the Palme d’Or race and cinema history side by side with work still finding its audience. For the 79th edition, it is a day that captures, in concentrated form, precisely what the festival is built to do: put the full range of world cinema in the same rooms, on the same day, and let it speak for itself.
