The 78th edition of Europe's biggest film festival starts today. We take a look at some notable titles across different sections -- Competition, Un Certain Regard, Directors' Fortnight and Critics' Week -- including a Thai film.
Renoir
Directed by Chie Hayakawa
Renoir.
As South Korea trudges through a difficult patch, Japan has reclaimed its place as an Asian vanguard in arthouse cinema. The two last Palme d'Or winners from Asia were Bong Joon-ho's Parasite in 2018 and Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters in 2019. Cannes 2025 has one Japanese and one Chinese title (Bi Gan's Resurrection) in the Competition. Meanwhile, Renoir is the new work of Chie Hayakawa, whose film Plan 75, a dystopian take on Japan's ageing society, won the Special Mention Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2022 and had a good run when it was released in Bangkok. Hayakawa's new film is set in 1987 and centres on an 11-year-old girl whose father is terminally ill, prompting her to seek refuge in a fantasy world.
Nouvelle Vague
Directed by Richard Linklater
It takes massive nerves for an American director to recount the fabled genesis of the Nouvelle Vague -- a group of French New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s. But this is Richard Linklater -- always sensible, always European-inclined -- and he certainly knows what he's walking into. Nouvelle Vague will chronicle the filming of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, a 1960 crime film that upended classical cinema language and launched the wave. Naturally, the film has actors playing a roster of legendary names in European film history -- Godard (Guillame Marbeck), Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubrey Dullin), plus actors playing Robert Bresson, Eric Rohmer, Jean Cocteau, Agnes Varda, Jacques Rivette and so on. This will be one of the hottest tickets in the Competition.
The History Of Sound
Directed by Oliver Hermanus
The History Of Sound.
Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal, the sensitive males of the Gen Z demographic, find their orbits intersecting in this World War II story of two students who set out together to record American folk songs of New England. It's a romantic story based on a short story by Ben Shattuck. The director, Oliver Hermanus, is from South Africa and had a film in the Competition once, back in 2011. The magnetic pull of the two leads is making this one of the buzziest titles in Cannes this year.
The Secret Agent
Directed by Kleber Mendoca Filho
The Secret Agent.
Brazilian filmmaker (and former film critic and programmer) Kleber Mendoca Filho finds political intrigue in the most mundane setting -- usually his city, Recife. In The Secret Agent, he takes us back to the late 1970s, during the final years of the Brazilian dictatorship. Wagner Moura (Pablo Escobar in Narcos) plays a schoolteacher who returns to his hometown only to realise that the past is never past. This is the third film by Mendoca Filho in the main Competition, after critics' favourites Aquarius and Bacurua.
A Pale View Of Hills
Directed by Kei Ishigawa
"Niki, the name we finally gave our younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father." So begins A Pale View Of Hills, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro on which this film is based. Niki is the younger daughter of Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman and her British husband. Now living in England, Etsuko, on the first pages of the book, discusses with Niki the suicide of her eldest daughter, whom she had with her Japanese ex-husband. This is a story of grief, names, memory and the mystery of human identity. This film adaptation comes from Kei Ishigawa, whose previous film A Man collected a bagful of Japanese film awards. Fans of the Nobel Prize-winning Ishiguro will certainly keep an eye on this one. A Pale View Of Hills will premiere in the Un Certain Regard.
Once Upon A Time In Gaza
Directed by Arab and Tarzan Nasser
Once Upon A Time In Gaza.
Gaza, 2007. Two Palestinian students are taken under the wing of a charismatic businessman and begin peddling drugs, then a corrupt cop intervenes. Not much is known about the film at this point, but the thriller narrative doesn't seem to be about the ongoing cruelty in Gaza. Having a film with the word "Gaza" in the title at least lends Cannes an air of political relevance, but how much or how relevant? The twin directors, Arab and Tarzan Nasser, grew up in Gaza and studied in France. Their short film Condom Lead was in the Cannes Competition in 2013. The film will screen in the Un Certain Regard.
A Useful Ghost
Directed by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke
A Useful Ghost.
Finally, a Thai film in Cannes and the first in 10 years (excluding Memoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, conceived and shot in Colombia and premiering in 2022). A Useful Ghost (Pee Chai Dai Kha in Thai) is a witty flip on one of the most familiar Thai cinematic tropes: A ghost-wife who returns from the dead to reunite with her living husband. But Ratchapoom takes that setup for a spin like a demented tuk-tuk on a Riviera racetrack. The ghost-wife possesses a vacuum cleaner (it can speak) and begins a nefarious campaign to prove her usefulness to the family of her husband. Cue a political edge to the offbeat story, and this makes A Useful Ghost one of the strangest and most original Thai films of the past many years. The film will premiere in the Critics' Week, a section dedicated for first and second films. We'll have more on it soon.
Urchin/The Chronology Of Water/Elenor The Great
Directed by Harry Dickinson/Kristen Stewart/Scarlett Johannsson
Three films by three actors making their directorial bow all screen in the Un Certain Regard. Harry Dickinson (the milkman in Babygirl) arrives with Urchin, a story of young drifters. Kristen Stewart, whose roles in European films of late have earned her plenty of new fans, directs The Chronology Of Water from the memoir of writer and swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch. Scarlett Johansson directs 95-year-old June Squibb in Elenor The Great, about a friendship between an old lady and a young student.
Magalhaes
Directed by Lav Diaz
Magalhaes.
That's Magellan -- as in Ferdinand Magellan. Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz casts Gael Garcia Bernal as the Portuguese explorer of the 16th century who led an expedition across the Pacific to fulfil the king of Spain's maritime ambition -- and ended up colonising the Philippines. This is Diaz's first film in Portuguese and Spanish, but the subject of Filipino history and his country's fraught, caustic past has always been in the master's resume. It's believed that Magalhaes, running at modest 156 minutes, is only the first part of a planned two-part film -- the second one being about Magellan's wife, Beatrice, and reportedly nine hours long.
Yes
Directed by Nadav Lapid
The character is called Y, a jazz musician. After the Oct 7 attack, Y is given an assignment from the government of Israel: To write a new national anthem. Nadav Lapid is a filmmaker whose searing interrogation of Israel nationhood, its right-wing ideology and moral decay makes him a controversial figure at home (his previous film, Ahed's Knee, also has a character named Y and concerns a filmmaker's scuffle with thought police; it won a Jury Prize at Cannes three years ago). Yes will be closely watched and interpreted given what's going on in Gaza and the current actions of the Israeli army. The film is showing in the Directors' Fortnight.
Sirat (Laxe)
Directed by Oliver Laxe
Oliver Laxe, a French-born Spanish filmmaker, returns to his favourite locale, Morocco, in his latest film, the first to crack the Competition. His films usually rely on sparse, documentary-like naturalness and landscapes that sketch the physical and mental state of the characters. In Sirat, the setting is a rave party in the Moroccan desert. A father arrives, with his son, to search for his daughter who disappeared a few months ago at another desert rave. Vast stretches of sand and thumping electronic music -- if there's a place in the world worthy of getting lost, and hopefully of being found, Laxe's film will take you there.
