From the Occupation to the Rwandan genocide, the festival’s selection gives pride of place to the often darkest pages of history. The Second World War particularly fascinates the selected directors. Decryption.
A trip to the ruined Germany of 1949. The journey of a minor civil servant of the Vichy regime. The last days of the life of Jean Moulin. Three of the films in competition for the Palme d’Or focus on the Second World War, a fourth takes place in the trenches of 1916, another partly during the Spanish Civil War. History comes to the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
From the presentation of the selection on Thursday April 9, the president of the festival set the tone. “The news reaching us from around the world is anything but reassuring (…). But the Cannes Film Festival was born in a moment of great uncertainty, in 1939 to be exact.” I rappelled Iris Knobloch in preambule“and it is precisely for this reason that it was created. Because in these moments, bringing together films and artists from all over the world is not a luxury, it is a necessity.”
/2026/05/04/69f8d85826bd6089201807.jpg "\"When filmmakers talk about history, they obviously talk about the present\" : why so many films presented at the Cannes Film Festival look to the past")
In this once again uncertain world, cinema felt the need to summon the past to better illuminate the present. Outside of competition too, the list of historical films is long. Among the synopses: the Rwandan genocide, the legacy of Che Guevara. But also the fate of General de Gaulle or the rescue of Jewish children in Vénissieux. The Second World War seems decidedly omnipresent in this selection.
“Not so much, if we compare with the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, which had more films on this theme.” smiles the historian Sylvie Lindeperg. His research focuses on the links between cinema and history, particularly that of the Second World War. “Unlike other conflicts, it remains the model of what we call a just war and symbolizes the confrontation of good against evil. This subject has always attracted filmmakers… But it is experiencing, in waves, moments of resurgence. Today we are undoubtedly witnessing one of these moments“.
For the historian, several reasons explain this popularity of historical films today. First the direct collapse of the world order resulting from 1945. “We are witnesses to the liquidation of the principles of international law and its regulatory bodies”, précise Sylvie Lindeperg. “The ideals upheld by the UN are being called into question, as is the legacy of the Nuremberg trials, which was the founding stone of international justice and criminalized aggressive war.”
This disregard for international law is accompanied by an instrumentalization of the history of the war by certain authoritarian regimes, led by Russia. “Putin makes it an ideological weapon at the cost of a totally biased rewriting of what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War. This awakens the capacity of the Second World War to rearm our present. When filmmakers talk about history, they obviously talk about the present.“
This is particularly true in France, where political news has been added to this international backdrop. “The period of war and Occupation is once again the subject of a counter-narrative conveyed by the extreme right, which opposes the official narrative carried by the public authorities on the occasion of major commemorations. I am thinking in particular of the offensive led by Éric Zemmour which led to the falsification of Vichy history. This environment influences the way films are read and perhaps also their production.”
This is clearly the case for Our Salvation by Emmanuel Marre, in official competition. The director was inspired by the story of his great-grandfather, Henri Marre, who became an official of the Vichy regime. “A human journey“, confided Emmanuel Marre during filming, just a year ago. “It wasn’t just the Nazis and the resistance fighters, there were also people who accommodated themselves, there were all the nuances. It’s important that we face this past.” But his film also speaks of the present, because it “allows us to think about moments of political hardening”, assumes the director.
Same approach with Daniel Auteuil, upset by the story of the rescue of 108 Jewish children in Vénissieux in 1942. The actor and director claims not to be “someone committed“, but he recognizes that The Third Night, presented at Cannes out of competition, has a strong resonance today. “In the film, we see these two characters saving people from deportation by using official Vichy regulations to their advantage. he explained during filming in December 2025. “There have always been people who were aware that what they were being asked to do was not very commendable, and who disobeyed. (…) The important thing is how everyone reacts to history.“
The choices of a character confronted with the upheavals of history. In Cannes, this theme is most often addressed through figures who actually existed: Gilbert Lesage and Abbé Glasberg for The Third NightGeneral de Gaulle in Antonin Gaudry, Jean Moulin for the film by Laszlo Nemes, the writer Thomas Mann in the Fatherland by Pawel Pawlikowski. This “biographical” prism is a marker of our time for Sylvie Lindeperg. “In the immediate post-war period, cinema favored the exaltation of the collective, the image of an armed people fighting for their liberation. recalls the historian. “The question of the incarnation of great historical figures emerged under the Gaullian Republic, with Is Paris burning? notably. It became predominant in the 1990s.“
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Today, the biopic makes it possible to make history more alive, more accessible to the general public… But it also makes it a sensitive subject for filmmakers, necessarily torn between historical truth and artistic freedom. “From the moment we talk about characters who existed, the requirement for rigor is necessarily greater“, résume Sylvie Lindeperg, “and historians find themselves established as instances, if not of control, at least of verification. Particularly when directors tackle always flammable subjects, like the Occupation and collaboration.“
As evidenced by the recent controversy surrounding the film Rays and shadows by Xavier Giannolli, highly criticized by certain historians for its historical inaccuracies, despite the presence of a scientific advisor on the filming. Well aware of the tensions around this period, Laszlo Nemes immediately wants to clear the ground for his film, Moulin : “It’s not a historical reenactment.” would like to specify the director at the microphone of RCJ, the Radio of the Jewish community. “We scripted in a very respectful way what we know but there are lots of things we don’t know. And we really did the last ten days of Jean Moulin. So it’s extremely focused. We are not at all in the reconstitution (…).”
There is no doubt that his film will, like the others, be closely scrutinized. A risk which does not discourage filmmakers tirelessly attracted by the dramaturgy of history.
/2026/05/16/6a088b1753246712288996.jpg "\"Marie-Madeleine\"a radical film by Géssica Généus on the contradictions shaking Haiti, presented at Cannes")
