Indie films race for Cannes top prize with big studios absent

22 indie contenders vie for Palme d'Or with no blockbusters or red-carpet rollouts

Tales of war, grief. artificial intelligence join a race for the 2026 Cannes Film Festival's top prize from Tuesday, in a contest left wide open by the absence of big studio contenders and other clear front-runners.

The glitzy festival. long a launch pad for Hollywood franchises such asIndiana JonesandTop Gun, will not host any blockbusters this year, nor the large-scale red‑carpet rollouts that typically accompany them, as risk‑averse studios grow more cautious.

There will still be plenty of big names on show - among them Barbra Streisand, winning a lifetime achievement award,. John Travolta, making his directorial debut.

"As long as the weather holds out, I think it's going to be a glamorous Cannes. Cannes does it better than anyone else," Scott Roxborough, European correspondent forThe Hollywood Reporter, toldReuterson Monday.

Field is open among 22 competitors

There are 22 films in competition for the Palme d'Or prize awarded at the closing ceremony on May 23, with independent cinema heavyweights including Pedro Almodovar. Laszlo Nemes.

"There's no one or two films that everybody has been waiting for that everybody's excited to see. which in some ways makes it more interesting because it makes it a real open field," said Roxborough.

Iran's Asghar Farhadi. Japan's Ryusuke Hamaguchi ofDrive My Carfame both have French-language family dramas:Parallel Tales, with Isabelle Huppert as a nosy neighbour, andAll Of a Sudden, about elderly care, respectively.

From the United States,Paper Tiger, directed by James Gray, will bring Scarlett Johansson. Adam Driver back together after 2019'sMarriage Story, while Rami Malek stars in a drama about HIV/AIDS in 1980s New York City in Ira Sachs'The Man I Love.

Two past winners - Romania's Cristian Mungiu and Japan's Hirokazu Kore‑eda - are vying for a second Palme d'Or. Kore-eda, who won withShopliftersin 2018, will explore grief and artificial intelligence inSheep In The Box. Mungiu returns withFjord, a family drama set in a remote Norwegian village starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan.

For the Romanian director, selection alone was already a prize.

"This selection is the best reward we could get for our efforts since Cannes is the place in the world where cinema is the most respected," Mungiu wrote on Instagram.

Politics present but cinema in focus

Politics are present in this year's selections, but often through historical lenses, Roxborough said, citing LukasDhont's Coward, a World War One‑era drama about soldiers,. Nemes'Moulin, which centres on the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France.

A Man Of His Time, by French director Emmanuel Marre, is also set in Vichy France. "It's very difficult for people to make definitive statements that aren't going to be immediately taken over by events," he said. adding that festival organisers remain keen to keep the focus firmly on cinema.

That emphasis is echoed in the opening film, Pierre Salvadori'sThe Electric Kiss, a romantic comedy set in interwar Paris. "In my own way, I try to offer a form of poetry or beauty," Salvadori toldReuters, describing the film as "an ode to fiction". to cinema itself.

and other social media platforms will attend a parallel creator economy event at the film market. while leading names from the fashion world will again be prominent around the Croisette.

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