Cannes 2026 Has More Queer Films Than Any Festival in Its History

The 79th Festival de Cannes opens on May 13, and by every measure available before the first projector rolls, it will be the most LGBTQ+ edition in the festival’s history. The Queer Palm jury has selected 21 feature films for its 16th annual prize — a record — and seven of the 22 films competing for the Palme d’Or itself feature LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or perspectives.

That second number is the more striking one. The Official Competition is the festival’s centerpiece, the slate of films that win or lose the Palme d’Or and dominate the world cinema conversation for the rest of the year. To have nearly a third of those films working with queer material — not as a subplot, not as a token character, but as central narrative — is a real shift from the Cannes of even five years ago.

What’s actually in competition

Pedro Almodóvar returns to the Croisette with Autofiction, his first competition entry since Pain and Glory. Lukas Dhont, the Belgian director who took the Grand Prix at 2022 with Close, is back with Coward. Ira Sachs, the American filmmaker behind Love Is Strange and Passages, brings The Man I Love. Jane Schoenbrun, whose I Saw the TV Glow became a transgender critical touchstone in 2024, has Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — a title that sounds like it’s daring critics to dismiss it.

The Spanish duo Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, best known internationally for the series Veneno, bring The Black Ball. Jordan Firstman, the comedian who built a following during lockdown and has been quietly developing a feature for years, premieres Club Kid. Kōji Fukada (Harmonium) brings A Few Days in Nagi, and Jeanne Herry — a recurring fixture in French auteur cinema — premieres Garance.

Outside the main competition, the parallel sections (Un Certain Regard, Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week) push the queer total even higher. The Queer Palm jury samples across all of those sections, which is how it ended up with 21 features in contention for a single prize.

What the Queer Palm is, and why it matters

The Queer Palm was founded in 2010 by the French journalist and producer Franck Finance-Madureira, partly as a response to the festival’s historical patchiness on queer cinema. Cannes had honored Blue Is the Warmest Colour with the Palme d’Or in 2013 and given Todd Haynes a platform for Carol in 2015, but those were exceptions. Many years passed with no openly queer film in the main competition. The Queer Palm was created to make sure that the festival’s queer films were tracked, jury-discussed, and given something to win even when the main jury overlooked them.

It is not a Cannes-administered prize — it is independent, with its own jury, and the official festival has not always been comfortable with that arrangement. But it has become one of the most-cited markers of queer cinema in Europe, and a film winning the Queer Palm now reliably draws international distribution attention.

This year’s jury is presided over by the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg, whose The Souvenir duology made her one of the most distinctive voices in European art cinema. Past winners include BPM (Beats Per Minute), Joyland, and last year’s recipient, the Brazilian film Levante.

The shift, in numbers

For perspective: the 2010 inaugural edition of the Queer Palm had four feature films in contention. By 2018, that number had risen to 12. In 2024, it was 16. This year’s 21 represents a 75 percent increase over six years.

The Official Competition trend is even sharper. In 2015, the year Carol premiered, that film was the only LGBTQ+ entry in the main competition. In 2026, there are seven. Whatever else is true about the political weather for queer people in Europe right now — and a great deal is true that is not encouraging — the cinema is moving faster than the politics.

Where the politics show up anyway

The festival itself is not insulated from the European cultural fight. France’s far-right Rassemblement National has spent the year campaigning against what it calls “gender ideology” in publicly funded culture, and several towns governed by RN mayors have removed Pride flags from public buildings in the past two months. Cannes, the city, has so far been quiet on this front; Cannes, the festival, is funded substantially by the Centre national du cinéma, which is itself a recurring target of the same political pressure campaign.

Inside the festival, the politics often surface in red carpet statements — last year’s Pride flag incident with one Eastern European director, the years of trans visibility moments at the Queer Palm ceremony — and in the films themselves. Coward, by Dhont, is reportedly about a gay man’s complicity with rising authoritarianism; Garance deals with the legal limbo of trans youth in France under the recent center-right healthcare guidelines. The films arriving in 2026 are not separable from the moment they were made in.

What to watch from May 13 to 24

• The opening weekend: Autofiction premieres May 14. Almodóvar at Cannes is always its own event, but this is his first time on the festival’s competition stage in seven years.
• May 20: The Queer Palm jury holds its public announcement. The shortlist alone is a useful annual benchmark for what the festival has agreed to take seriously.
• Closing night, May 24: The Palme d’Or announcement. With seven LGBTQ+ films in the running, the question is no longer whether there will be a queer film on stage. It’s how many.

The 2026 lineup will not, by itself, change the political weather for LGBTQ+ Europeans. But it does answer a question that the festival has been getting asked for two decades: whether queer cinema is a niche or a center of contemporary filmmaking. With nearly one in three Official Competition films now openly working with queer material, the answer this year is not in doubt.

The festival runs May 13 to 24 in Cannes, France. Queer Palm coverage and screening lists are tracked by the prize’s organizers and by Fugues, the Quebec LGBTQ+ magazine that has historically had the most thorough festival reporting in French.