Cannes started with a sing-along. At the opening ceremony of the 79th festival on Tuesday (May 12), French-Congolese singer and rapper Theodora and French singer-songwriter Oklou walked into the lights to perform the Beatles’ “Get Back” for Peter Jackson, who had just received an honorary Palme d’Or. Jackson, The Hollywood Reporter says, bopped his head, clapped and sang along, and so did jury member Demi Moore.
The tribute came from Elijah Wood, who told Jackson, per Variety:
You showed the world something it had never seen before, and nothing was ever the same
Elijah Wood, to Peter Jackson, Variety
Jackson said he is not really a “Palme kinda guy,” and joked about how Warner Bros. was up for sale when he brought 20 minutes of The Fellowship of the Ring to the festival in 2001, as it is again now: “What goes around comes around.” A clip from Jackson’s Beatles documentary introduced the “Get Back” performance.
Jane Fonda and Gong Li shared the job of declaring the festival open, and Fonda used the moment to defend the form. “I believe that cinema has always been an act of resistance,” she said, according to Variety. The opening film was Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss, a French romantic comedy set in 1920s Paris. It got a five-minute standing ovation, even though the reviews were mixed.
The lineup
What the festival lacks is Hollywood. Variety notes there are no big studio films and a thin celebrity turnout, and Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg both chose not to bring The Odyssey or Disclosure Day. Instead, festival chief Thierry Fremaux announced on April 9 an auteur-led competition, with 65% of the films coming from France, Japan and Spain, per Deadline. Park Chan-wook leads a jury that includes Moore, Chloé Zhao, Ruth Negga and Stellan Skarsgård.
Read moreThe 2027 Festival Circuit Is Already Taking Shape, and the Same Names Keep Showing Up
The competition slate includes Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord with Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland with Sandra Hüller, Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales and Na Hong-jin’s Hope, with Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. Ira Sachs is the only American in competition, with The Man I Love, which Deadline calls a “musical fantasia of a city under duress,” set in 1980s New York and starring Rami Malek.
The music-and-youth picks are elsewhere. Steven Soderbergh brings the documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview out of competition, per IndieWire, and Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, from the director of I Saw the TV Glow, opens Un Certain Regard, with Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. It later reached cinemas in August. Barbra Streisand also receives an honorary Palme d’Or.
The festival runs through May 23, when the Palme d’Or will be announced. Neon has released the last six Palme winners, so keep an eye on the company’s Fjord. We have the winners.
- 79th Cannes Film Festival
- May 12–23, 2026; jury president Park Chan-wook
- Opening film
- *The Electric Kiss* (*La Vénus électrique*), Pierre Salvadori
- Honorary Palmes d’Or
- Peter Jackson and Barbra Streisand
Sources
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.
