Cannes’s Pull Between Past, Present and Future

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]I'm Melissa Wilkinson. I'm a movie critic at the New York Times and I am here at the Can Film Festival.

[00:00:07]This year, there's been a big tug between the old and the new. On the one hand, the festival said no film that uses generative AI as a major part of its creation will be eligible for the main competition. On the other hand, there's a whole section of the festival that is devoted to looking at the future of cinema through artificial intelligence.

[00:00:29]Three of my favorite things that I've seen really illustrated that spectrum from old to new. The first one is Fatherland by Powell Palikovski. This film is about the writer Thomas Man.

[00:00:41]He's traveling with his daughter in a country that's really just trying to figure out what Germany looks like after the fall of the Third Reich. It's prestigious, quiet, thoughtful. It's the sort of film that you come to Ken to see. On the other hand was Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Directed by Jane Shonbrun.

[00:01:00]>> He always comes back.

[00:01:04]>> What? It stars Hannah Ein Bender from Hacks as a Sundance Darling director who's asked to reboot a horror franchise. It's postmodern. It has jokes and references. It's exactly the kind of film that feels very much of this moment and very much 2026. And honestly, one of my favorite things that I've seen here isn't even technically a film. It's an immersive experience. It's called Playing with Fire. I went into a room. I put on a VR headset. A pianist came in and played a full classical concert.

[00:01:44]I could walk around in the room and a whole artistic rendering of a kind of mythical story of the history of humanity grew around me for this 45minute long concert. That's not really cinema even, but it certainly is art.

[00:01:58]And I thought a lot about how the founders of the Can Film Festival definitely never thought that something like that would ever be happening here in Can during the festival. All of these projects together really do a good job of showing us that the Ken Film Festival is not just one thing. It's about all of cinematic history and really about how art and technology and different kinds of storytelling are always going to be working together and they're always going to be here. They're going to be pushing the form forward.