Here’s Paris Match’s Yannick Vely with his annual March rumors piece for Cannes. Honestly, it parallels what I had reported two weeks ago — Coen, Almodóvar, Gray, Östlund, Zvyagintsev, Refn, Dhont, Kore-eda, Sorogoyen, Kreutzer, Farhadi, Mungiu, Hamaguchi, Harari, and maybe, Malick.
Curiously, no mention of Pawel Pawlikowski who is still editing “1949,” and has been internally telling his people that the film might be aiming for 2027, although I have my suspicions that he might be ready on time for this year’s edition.
Same goes for Albert Serra, not mentioned, who I had heard assembled a near 4- hour assembly cut of “Out of This World,” starring Riley Keough.
I’m told Paul Schrader has submitted “The Basics of Philosophy” for Cannes, but there’s obviously no guarantee he’ll get in. His last film, “Oh Canada,” made competition in 2024, and that was the first time he vied for the Palme d’Or since the ‘80s.
The report does mention that whispers out of the Berlinale had two films emering as potential Cannes 2026 openers: Antonin Baudry‘s “De Gaulle: Part One” and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas” — both of which would need to adhere to Cannes rules, if they were to be selected for opening night, and release the following day in France.
Furthermore, there is the real possibility Nanni Moretti might not finish his new film in time for this year’s Cannes, due to health issues. And more fascinatingly, Na Hong-jin has apparently had a "complicated" edit with his long-anticipated “Hope,” starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander — no further details were given.
Billed as Na’s most ambitious film yet, “Hope” unfolds in the remote village of Hope Harbor near Korea’s DMZ, where a reported tiger sighting draws a local police chief (Hwang Jung-min) into an investigation that spirals from rural unease into a destabilizing cosmic mystery.
Na, who hasn’t released a film since his 2016 genre masterwork The Wailing, began production on Hope in late 2023 and has been in post-production since.