Festival Circuit 2026

[hearthesilence]

Justine Triet, Arnaud Desplechin, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Claire Denis and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are among the signatories of an open letter in support of Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid after he was forced to pull out of French film festival FID Marseille this week as part of a cultural boycott of Israel due to the actions of its government in Gaza.

“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” said the letter, which was published in French newspaper Le Monde yesterday (June 8).

Signed by more than 350 filmmakers and actors, the letter said the pressure on FID Marseille and Lapid in recent weeks “cannot be ignored” and described the calls to boycott the festival, threats directed at its partners and funders and the withdrawal of films as “a campaign of intimidation”.

The letter argued against the idea of “an artist being reduced to his nationality”, and said calling for Lapid’s removal “is not a matter of critical disagreement or artistic debate, it is about a desire to exclude a filmmaker from a space for discussion and creation… [This] undermines a certain vision of cinema and culture.”

It continued: “In what way does the presence of a filmmaker on a jury or the screening of one of his films make him a representative of a state?”

Lapid has been living in France since 2021. His most recent film Yes, which premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2025, received funding from the state-supported Israel Film Fund but was a scathing critique of the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu.

[beamish14]

[url=https://www.screendaily.com/news/french ... 27.article]

Lapid has been living in France since 2021. His most recent film Yes, which premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2025, received funding from the state-supported Israel Film Fund but was a scathing critique of the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel spends an enormous amount of money on its propaganda. If Russian-state sponsored works can’t be shown, neither should this shit

[Never Cursed]

Haven’t seen it, but from the descriptions I’ve heard Yes is more propaganda against Israel than in its favor. Worth noting that most of the directors mentioned above in the petition are hardly Zionists themselves

[beamish14]

Haven’t seen it, but from the descriptions I’ve heard Yes is more propaganda against Israel than in its favor. Worth noting that most of the directors mentioned above in the petition are hardly Zionists themselves

Denis, having made many films about France’s colonial history, really should know better…

[tenia]

As far as I know, there is a reason that the Israel Film Fund is written to be "state-supported" rather than anything more direct : because it supposedly acts as an independant organism, but its existence and sustaining is bound by the law.

If anything, I'd guess the current government would much prefer having a tighter grip on what movies are produced, and is unlikely to like a movie like Yes.

[knives]

Haven’t seen it, but from the descriptions I’ve heard Yes is more propaganda against Israel than in its favor. Worth noting that most of the directors mentioned above in the petition are hardly Zionists themselves

Denis, having made many films about France’s colonial history, really should know better…

You’re really showing some major ignorance here. Supporting a ban on Lapid would be as backwards as supporting a ban on Panahi. He’s made stridently anti-government films, including כן, and has been regularly attacked by Netanyahu as well as punished in various ways. Removing him from a festival is cutting your nose to spite someone else’s face.

[Captain Paranoia]

Haven’t seen it, but from the descriptions I’ve heard Yes is more propaganda against Israel than in its favor. Worth noting that most of the directors mentioned above in the petition are hardly Zionists themselves

Denis, having made many films about France’s colonial history, really should know better…

Ironically, I recall she (alongside several other individuals who signed this petition) among the signatories in a petition back in 2023 condemning Israel's destructive response (and Lapid was among not of only the signatories of such petition, but also was among a handful of Israeli filmmakers who came to Jonathan Glazer's defense following his acceptance speech) so it probably shows where they stand on the conflict in general.

On an incidental note (which more ties to the Berlinale controversy a few months back), the head of Berlinale got into trouble with the Ministry of State for posing alongside a Palestine flag which led to various signatories coming to her defense (interestingly, among the signatories was Sean Baker, given the shit he's gotten on socmed for allegedly having pro-Israel views) so I sense my theory that the jury's handling of the situation was at least partially out of concerns of angering the government was vindicated.

[Never Cursed]

Venice lineup announced. All the trades are complaining about the lack of big studio films (which isn't even true, as Wild Horse Nine is in Competition - guess they really wanted Digger to show up), but buried in the lineup are some stranger titles still, such as Luca Guadagnino's seven-hour-long documentary on Bernardo Bertolucci Joie de Vivre and a re-edit of Ilya Khrzhanovsky's long-troubled DAU project into a 210-minute film simply titled Dau.

[therewillbeblus]

The Boston French Film Festival starts tomorrow at the MFA - any suggestions? I don't think I recognize the films on the slate

[Never Cursed]

La petite dernière is a solid queer coming-of-age movie elevated by an incredible lead performance from a non-actor (justly winning the Best Actress award at Cannes over what I presume was relatively tough competition). Its director, Hafsia Herzi, is probably best known for playing the daughter in Abdellatif Kechiche's La graine et le mulet. A couple others (Dossier 137, L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche) looked good and I wanted to see at Rendez-Vous with French Cinema this past year, but wasn't able to. domino liked the latter of those.

[Never Cursed]

Also, head of Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbara noted in an interview that he had wanted to program Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, but Neon didn't want it at the festival before securing international sales

[spectre]

Fjord will definitely have Discourse whenever it reemerges around the NYFF.

I expect so too! Here's my own 2-cent contribution to that Discourse in the meantime: I caught Mungiu's film at Melbourne's Nordic Film Festival on the weekend and I found it both effective and frustrating. This is unimpeachable filmmaking in terms of cinematography, editing and performance, but also highly typical of a kind of film that tends to get feted at Cannes and other big European film festivals lately: studious, somewhat removed, narratively ambiguous, methodically engaged with fraught real-life issues (think Anatomy of a Fall, The Teachers' Lounge, A Hero, etc., etc.). Once you've seen one of these films, you've kind of seen them all. I don't think Mungiu is bringing much new to the table here apart from the subject matter, which is at least interesting.

Spoiler

The biggest faultline in this film's reception will likely occur around whether a) you take the film's representation of the Norwegian child protection system at face value, in which case one is clearly led to sympathise with the family and view the Norwegian system as officious and dehumanising, even while ostensibly being encouraged to "see both sides" of the issue to an extent; or b) you're more sceptically inclined, in which case you may well find its representation of that system unfair or even preposterous. (People working in child protection don't seem overly enthusiastic about the film; see this thoughtful but damning Letterboxd review, which contains more detailed spoilers, for instance.) Even for someone like me who doesn't know much about how things are done over there, elements of the film seem a bit dubious and overegged, particularly the child protection hearings (in a proceeding like this, are you really going to get a barrister on the other side acting like he's some prosecutor in a high-profile criminal trial performing for a packed courtroom, for instance?). But I think my bigger problem with the film is that it's all a bit airless; Mungiu tugs at the heartstrings with the relationship between the teenage neighbours and also Reinsve's character's bond with the elderly grandfather next door, but these are subordinated to the main plot and feel overly functional as a result.

All in all, it's a good film for provoking discussion and debate about real-world issues, but there's a fair bit of deck-stacking going on too, and it's hard not to read that a little cynically.

[dda1996a]

Fjord will definitely have Discourse whenever it reemerges around the NYFF.

I expect so too! Here's my own 2-cent contribution to that Discourse in the meantime: I caught Mungiu's film at Melbourne's Nordic Film Festival on the weekend and I found it both effective and frustrating. This is unimpeachable filmmaking in terms of cinematography, editing and performance, but also highly typical of a kind of film that tends to get feted at Cannes and other big European film festivals lately: studious, somewhat removed, narratively ambiguous, methodically engaged with fraught real-life issues (think Anatomy of a Fall, The Teachers' Lounge, A Hero, etc., etc.). Once you've seen one of these films, you've kind of seen them all. I don't think Mungiu is bringing much new to the table here apart from the subject matter, which is at least interesting.

Spoiler

The biggest faultline in this film's reception will likely occur around whether a) you take the film's representation of the Norwegian child protection system at face value, in which case one is clearly led to sympathise with the family and view the Norwegian system as officious and dehumanising, even while ostensibly being encouraged to "see both sides" of the issue to an extent; or b) you're more sceptically inclined, in which case you may well find its representation of that system unfair or even preposterous. (People working in child protection don't seem overly enthusiastic about the film; see this thoughtful but damning Letterboxd review, which contains more detailed spoilers, for instance.) Even for someone like me who doesn't know much about how things are done over there, elements of the film seem a bit dubious and overegged, particularly the child protection hearings (in a proceeding like this, are you really going to get a barrister on the other side acting like he's some prosecutor in a high-profile criminal trial performing for a packed courtroom, for instance?). But I think my bigger problem with the film is that it's all a bit airless; Mungiu tugs at the heartstrings with the relationship between the teenage neighbours and also Reinsve's character's bond with the elderly grandfather next door, but these are subordinated to the main plot and feel overly functional as a result.

All in all, it's a good film for provoking discussion and debate about real-world issues, but there's a fair bit of deck-stacking going on too, and it's hard not to read that a little cynically.

I agree, and I found it to be rather neutered in the end. That's similar to how I felt about Mungiu's RMN - his last two films have tackled trans-national "racism" in such a heavy-handed way, the films lack what made 4M3W2D and Above the Hills (and Graduation as well, to a lesser effect) so immediate and terrific.

I really miss the days when a palme D'or winner was truly sui-generis (give or a take a few blunders over the years). I don't think I really got excited about one in the last decade except Anora (and slightly less so, Parasite). Of course to say nothing about Berlin or Venice winners...