How the Cannes 2026 films reflect a world in conflict

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival features an unusually large number of films centered on life during wartime. Lukas Dhont’s Belgian World War I drama “Coward” follows young soldiers in trenches as they confront ideas of heroism and masculinity. Volker Schlondorff’s “Visitation” traces three families near Berlin across decades, from Hitler’s rise to the fall of the Berlin Wall, reflecting on the Second World War and its aftermath. French films “Moulin” and “De Gaulle: Tilting Iron” focus on resistance to Nazi occupation, while “A Man of His Time” examines wartime collaboration. These historical stories connect to the present by addressing the rise of the far right, fascism, and psychological trauma.

"The 2026 Cannes Film Festival, it seems, has war on its mind. An extraordinary number of movies at this year's festival, which concludes on May 23, deal with the experience of life in wartime. In Lukas Dhont's Belgian World War I drama “Coward,” young soldiers in the trenches confront ideas of heroism and masculinity. “Visitation,” the latest film from Volker Schlondorff (“The Tin Drum”), continues the German director's obsession with the Second World War and its aftermath, tracing the fate of three families living on a lake near Berlin through decades of turbulent history, from the rise of Hitler until the fall of the Berlin Wall."

"These films, like all historical movies, are really about now. The rise of the far right across Europe has spooked European filmmakers and they are looking to the past to find answers, to tell stories about how a nation falls prey to fascism, and how people behave under authoritarian rule: some bravely, heroically, others craven and self-serving. These films are all concerned with the damage war does to the psyche, with the historic trauma wrought on those who take part in the killing and on those who look away."

"Of the wartime movies, “A Man of His Time,” from director Emmanuel Marre, is the most original, and the most bracing. Ostensibly a period piece, the film is shot like a grungy indie flick with 20-somethings in vintage costumes talking and behaving like Gen Zs as they kowtow to Nazi authority as a way to get ahead. “A Man of His Time” inventively portrays the gears the fascism through a portrait of a Vichy collaborator"

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