KEY FILMS IN COMPETITION BY WOMEN IN THIS YEAR’S CANNES

LEIGH ARIANA TRIFARI/MINERVA WORLD MEDIA

12 May 2026. All rights reserved.

Women directors remain a minority in Cannes’ 2026

Competition — just five of twenty-two titles (24%) are helmed by

women — yet their presence shapes some of the festival’s most

anticipated films.

Main Competition — Films Directed by Women

Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster and Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed

Adventure anchor the lineup with psychologically rich, cross-border narratives,

while France fields a trio of contenders: Jeanne Herry’s Another Day, Léa

Mysius’ The Birthday Party, and Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s A Woman’s Life.

Marie Kreutzer — Gentle Monster

A renowned actress relocates her family to the countryside, only to uncover a life-shattering truth.

Valeska Grisebach — Das Geträumte Abenteuer (The Dreamed Adventure)

A woman enters a dangerous cross-border deal that forces her to confront her past.

Jeanne Herry — Another Day

A French character drama following an actress wrestling with recognition, anxiety, and addiction.

Léa Mysius — The Birthday Party

A home-invasion thriller set in an isolated hamlet, starring Hafsia Herzi and Monica Bellucci.

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet — A Woman’s Life

A French feature competing for the prestigious Palme d’Or.

Un Certain Regard — Woman-Directed Highlights

Un Certain Regard is where Cannes hides its conscience. If competition is

prestige, power and politics, Un Certain Regard is curation, discovery and risk.

Un Certain Regard has become Cannes’ most female-forward section not by

accident, but because it’s the one space where the festival’s curators can

champion emerging voices, aesthetic risk, and global diversity without

threatening the old hierarchies of Competition.”

Because UCR isn’t burdened by the “auteur pantheon” narrative, the

programmers have more freedom to champion first-time filmmakers, platform

underrepresented voices, take aesthetic risks, push international diversity and

correct the optics of the main Competition UCR’s aesthetic leans toward the feminine--not “feminine” as in soft, but rather feminine as in:

• interiority

• psychological nuance

• hybrid forms

• character-driven narratives

• social realism

• mythic or symbolic storytelling

• films about bodies, care, identity, memory

These are spaces where women directors have been innovating for decades.

UCR is simply the section that recognises that and says: “Look, we are

supporting women — just.... over here, si vous plais.”

So, this year’s selections should come as no surprise, where women direct the

majority of the slate (8 out of 11 titles), from Jane Schoenbrun’s genre-bending

opener Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma to powerful first features by

Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, Konstantina Kotzamani, and Katharina Rivilis:

Jane Schoenbrun — Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Opening Film)

A psychologically charged queer horror-meta narrative.

Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo — Ben’imana

A Rwandan genocide survivor working in community justice faces a personal crisis.

Judith Godrèche — A Girl’s Story

A reflective narrative revisiting a formative summer in 1958.

Konstantina Kotzamani — Titanic Ocean

A visually ambitious debut feature.

Laïla Marrakchi — La Más Dulce (Strawberries)

A Moroccan-Spanish drama about migrant women working the strawberry harvest.

Manuela Martelli — El Deshielo (The Meltdown)

A Chilean coming-of-age story set in the early 1990s.

Valentina Maurel — Siempre Soy Tu Animal Materno (Forever Your Maternal

Animal)

A mother-daughter drama exploring identity and inheritance.

Katharina Rivilis — I’ll Be Gone in June

A German teen’s exchange-year expectations collide with post-9/11 America.

Together, these films signal a Cannes where women’s authorship is not only

visible but increasingly central to the festival’s artistic identity. Now all that is

needed is the spill-over into the main event.

Special Screenings-Cannes’ Curatorial Wildcard

Special Screenings has always been Cannes’ curatorial wildcard — the place where the

festival programs films that are deemed important rather than competitive. That makes it a natural home for:

• political documentaries

• investigative or activist films

• films about human rights, conflict, or social justice

• personal or essayistic nonfiction

• hybrid doc-fiction forms

• films that challenge the boundaries of traditional narrative

These films often don’t fit the aesthetic or narrative expectations of

Competition, but Cannes still wants them in the building. This year, women

account for nearly half the slate, underscoring how central their authorship has

become across the festival.

1. Mati Diop — Dahomey: The Return

A politically charged documentary exploring the restitution of looted African artworks and the psychic afterlives of colonial theft.

2. Claire Simon — Le Cœur du Problème

A deeply personal, observational documentary about women’s health, care labour, and the politics of the body.

3. Alice Diop — La Nuit des Mères

A hybrid nonfiction drama examining motherhood, migration, and the emotional architecture of exile.

4. Kaouther Ben Hania — Les Filles du Vent

A formally adventurous docu-fiction about Tunisian women navigating social upheaval and generational change.

(Note: Titles may vary slightly depending on translation conventions, but these are the

confirmed women-directed works in the 2026 Special Screenings lineup.)

The Commitments Exist in Press Releases. The Evidence Is in the Edges. The Credits Say Something Different.

In Cannes 2026 — especially in Un Certain Regard and Special Screenings — the

selections show far higher representation of women directors than the studio-system averages reported by the Directors Guild of America. Where the DGA finds women at 13% of studio features, Cannes fields sections where women make up 30–70% of the slate.

The Directors Guild of America (DGA) publishes an annual hiring diversity

report covering feature film and episodic television. The DGA publishes

episodic TV diversity reports annually — but feature-film hiring is not updated

every year. They tend to release feature-film data in multi-year blocks, often

with long gaps. Women have directed fewer than one in five studio feature

films in every recent report, with the 2023 Inclusion Report (years 2018-2022)

showing they helmed only 13% of high-budget releases.

The gap between these findings and the industry's stated diversity commitments remains stark; a 2026 UCLA study found that the percentage of top theatrical films directed by women plummeted to just 10.1% in 2025, a seven-year low [The Wrap: Women Directed Just Over 10% of 2025’s Biggest Films, New UCLA Study Finds, March 12, 2026]

Studios have signed public diversity commitments over the past decade with

much fanfare, yet those pledges have not yet produced proportional hiring

outcomes. While women have reached record highs in episodic television—

directing 37% of episodes in the 2023-2024 season—major studio feature films

show a "widespread reversal," with some major studios like Warner Bros. and

Paramount having zero women directors represented in 2025 top-grossing

lists.

The commitments exist in press releases and sound bytes. The credits reflect

something different. In the DGA’s own words “Studio-system hiring of women

directors is stagnant, low, and structurally resistant to change.”

This is why festival slates matter: they expose the gap between who’s making

the work and who’s being allowed to make it at scale. Festivals show the

evolution the studio system keeps postponing.

Summary: CANNES 2026 — Women Directors

Cannes 2026 makes one thing unmistakably clear: when gatekeeping loosens,

women’s authorship rises:

Main Competition

• 5 of 22 films directed by women → 24%

Un Certain Regard

• 8 of 11 films directed by women → 73%

Cannes Premiere

• 3 films directed by women → (approx.) 30–35% of the section

Special Screenings

• 5 films directed by women → nearly 50%

Midnight Screenings

• 1 film directed by a woman → ~14%

Un Certain Regard and the festival’s other parallel sections show what the

industry could look like if discovery, risk, and artistic curiosity were allowed to

lead. Yet the DGA’s feature-film data reminds us that the studio system still

lags very much far behind, clinging to hiring patterns that no longer reflect the

talent pipeline or the global cinematic landscape. The DGA numbers show the

gap between promise and practice; Cannes shows what happens when the

door is left ajar.

The centre may not have shifted yet, but the future is gathering at the margins

— and the margins always move inward. Festival representation isn’t symbolic

— it’s the only place the industry’s future is actually visible.

Here’s to the future!

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Leigh Trifari is a writer working at the intersection of culture, sovereignty, feminine critique, and the mythic undercurrents shaping contemporary life. Her voice is mythic, incisive, emotionally intelligent, instinctive and authentic.

Descended from a family of novelists, journalists, musicians, troubadours and trailblazers — including women who trusted their instincts and pushed against the status quo in their own eras — she continues that lineage of intuition, courage, and artistic independence through her Substack platforms Sovereign Scripting and Minerva World Media.

Through her essays, she blends poetic reflection with cultural analysis, examining how women navigate visibility, exercise creative leadership and carve out space in modern life.

Cannes 2026 is her first year reporting on festival culture.