GFT in Cannes: Paul Gallagher's Top Picks

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GFT at Cannes: Paul Gallagher's Top Picks

Last month, our Programme Manager Paul Gallagher experienced the excitement of one of the world’s most celebrated film festivals — Cannes. Now, he's sharing his personal highlights: 10 standout films that might just be lighting up our screens in the near future.

The Cannes Film Festival has taken place for another year, which means the starting gun for the year in international independent cinema has been officially fired. One of the major perks of my job is that I get to be there, to watch lots of films — and hear about many more — that will end up finding their way into indie cinema programmes for the next 12 months and beyond.

I saw 28 films in the seven days that I was there, and below are short reviews of my 10 favourites out of that selection (the text in italics is the festival’s official blurb for the films – the text below that is my commentary!).

None of these films have UK release dates as yet, but I fully expect most if not all of them to be major releases in the autumn/winter ‘awards friendly’ period this year or in early 2026. Keep your eyes on our schedules – there is plenty here to look forward to!

Sound of Falling (Dir. Mascha Schilinski)

Four girls, Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka, each spend their youth on the same farm in northern Germany. As the home evolves over a century, echoes of the past linger in its walls. Though separated by time, their lives begin to mirror each other.

The first film I saw at the festival, this remained my highlight through all the other films I watched, I just couldn’t shake it! For the first 45 minutes or so I was unsure what the greater meaning or point was, but the individual scenes are so strong and confidently made that I was engaged and wanted to keep watching.

'Confidence' is the key word here — as we gradually understand the four separate time periods, and that the house/location is the same, we realise we're in the hands of a filmmaker in complete control of their vision. The use of repeated images, immersive sound design and slowly drip-fed nuggets of information is mind-bogglingly precise. It's a lot to ask of an audience, but the feeling of gradual understanding is really rewarding. Tonally it’s comparable to The Zone of Interest and The White Ribbon — that sense of creeping dread within the mundane.

The Secret Agent (Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)

Brazil, 1977. Marcelo, a technology expert in his early 40s, is on the run. He arrives in Recife during carnival week, hoping to reunite with his son but soon realises that the city is far from being the non-violent refuge he seeks.

This brilliant film opens with a reference in the opening text to it being a time of ‘mischief’ in Brazil, and this word sets up how the film will unfold; there is a playful aspect to its tone and the way it takes shaggy-dog type excursions, even in telling a life-and-death story. It’s packed with incident and memorable characters and performances, even from characters with just one scene. Lead actor Wagner Moura (winner of Cannes’ Best Actor award) is a compelling and compassionate central presence, and around him this amazing cast create a film that feels truly alive.

As well as being about Brazil’s troubled history (much like this year’s I’m Still Here) it is a film in love with cinema, with key action revolving around a classic movie house where Jaws is constantly re-running, and The Omen is terrifying audiences daily. It is a film of stories-within-stories, used as a way of pulling back the layers of a country’s traumatic past — like Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes or Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers. Richly dense, hugely satisfying, it’s an absolute must-see.

Sentimental Value (Dir. Joachim Trier)

Sisters Nora and Agnes reunite with their estranged father, the charismatic Gustav, a once-renowned director who offers stage actress Nora a role in what he hopes will be his comeback film. When Nora turns it down, she soon discovers he has given her part to an eager young Hollywood star. Suddenly, the two sisters must navigate their complicated relationship with their father — and deal with an American star dropped right into the middle of their complex family dynamics.

This is a less direct and immediate film than Trier’s previous hit, The Worst Person in the World, but it’s more mature, more complex and tackles knottier issues with arguably more emotionally resonant results. It has many elements that take a while to coalesce — it’s the story of an actress (Renate Reinsve) and her film director father (Stellan Skarsgård), and their broken relationship, which is mainly the result of his being a very self-centred and distant presence in her childhood. She’s grown up to be closed-off and melancholy. Then there is her sister (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), the third key character, more settled with a husband and infant son. But she feels the impacts of the past as strongly as her sister (their mother died when they were young) and in fact their connection is one of the real highlights of the film. Added to this trio of family relationships we have the house they grew up in, which is itself made a character, in part by the narration that leads us novellistically through the story, and in particular in an extended sequence that details the history of their relatives who’ve lived in that house over the previous hundred years or so.

Trier's achievement here is substantial — the film is about making art and being in a family, and how those things can both hurt and help each other. It's also about the importance of place, the changing nature of the film industry, and the incredible ability of talented men to be absolute a-holes. It's funny and warm, and concludes with two beautifully done scenes that make for a very satisfying, moving ending.

Die My Love (Dir. Lynne Ramsay)

The summary in the Cannes programme for this film was simply:

Love

Madness

Love

That’s pretty apt for this new film from Lynne Ramsay — only her fifth feature in 25 years of directing — which is difficult to sum up in words. It is a visceral and sensory experience, in which we follow Jennifer Lawrence’s character, the mother of a new baby, through the boredom and increasing madness of her daily routine in a remote house somewhere in rural America. Her husband (Robert Pattinson) is loving but often absent, and increasingly disconnected with and insensitive to what she is going through. Disconcerting sound design is prominent, along with frankly jaw-dropping cinematography by Seamus McGarvey — some of the images of Lawrence outside the house at night time are beautiful and terrifying. Lawrence’s incredible performance, along with Ramsay’s unerring sense of details and atmosphere, make for many moments that are unforgettable. The film gets at a feeling of disconnect where it’s just not possible for the person who feels it to put it into words — and being where they are at, why would they try?

Nouvelle Vague (Dir. Richard Linklater)

This is the story of Godard making Breathless, told in the style and spirit in which Godard made Breathless.

Richard Linklater's character-first approach is a great way to recreate this moment in cinema history. I'm so glad there's no attempt to imitate Godard's style other than shooting in black and white and using old film stock — in fact this is a resolutely conventional film in terms of editing and storytelling. Linklater just wants us to enjoy the performances (which are soooo good) and soak up the sense of hanging out with Godard, how infuriating, inspiring and hilarious it (might) have been.

It also doesn't treat any moment of Breathless's creation as holy scripture, there's no 'we'll use jump cuts!' revelation moment — it just flows. I found it an absolute treat, and think there will be a keen GFT audience who will have the same reaction.

Left-Handed Girl (Dir. Shih-Ching Tsou)

A single mother and her two daughters return to Taipei after several years of living in the countryside to open a stand at a buzzing night market. Each in their own way, will have to adapt to this new environment to make ends meet and succeed in maintaining the family unity. Three generations of family secrets begin to unravel after the youngest daughter — who is left-handed — is told by her traditional grandfather to never use her 'devil hand'.

This is so enjoyable, anchored by an irresistible performance from Nina Yeh as I-Jing, the little girl whose perspective it’s largely told from — she is charming and cheeky, with emotions right on the surface, in the way of all 5-year-olds.

The story focuses on a mother and two daughters, one in her late teens/early 20s, the other the 5 year-old, relocating to Taipei. Their life revolves around the noodle stand the mum works at, and much of the film happens in the bustling avenues of the Taipei street markets — punctuated by great city sequences of the older daughter zipping about on her moped. The tone is mostly light and funny, despite dealing with hardship — it's made of episodes in their life as we follow their first months in Taipei, as dramas of various scale bubble to the surface while life goes on.

It is a lovely film about parent-child relationships, living in the shadow of poverty and yet making the best of things. Then those old chestnuts of family expectations and social shame rear their unwelcome heads. It's like Hirokazu Kore-eda made a film with Sean Baker — which I guess makes Shih-Ching Tsou the new Kore-eda, since she actually did co-write this with Baker (who also edits). And it features the best film appearance by a meerkat in my memory.

It Was Just an Accident (Dir. Jafar Panahi)

What begins as a minor accident sets in motion a series of escalating consequences.

The winner of the Palme d’Or, this is a really good, morally complex Iranian drama that surely stands to be Panahi’s biggest film to date when it gets its UK release.

The title can also be translated as ‘A Simple Accident’, and that is perhaps the better one, as what begins simply becomes increasingly complex in its depth and implications. The ‘accident’ is also the chance encounter at the start between garage mechanic Vahid and a man who comes in to get his car fixed while on a journey with his wife and small daughter. Vahid immediately suspects something about this man — something that is not clear to us, but causes him to take sudden and extreme action. From this point Panahi leads us on a journey whose conclusion we could never guess. The group of characters that he gathers, and how each of them reacts and influences the direction of things, is masterfully written. Then the way he interlaces it with humour while asking seriously tough questions — about evil, forgiveness, mercy and whether retribution is a reasonable and right approach. The film's powerful final long sequence digs into these questions in a way that's stark and confrontational, with no easy answers given.

Romeria (Dir. Carla Simón)

Marina, 18, orphaned at a young age, must travel to Spain’s Atlantic coast to obtain a signature for a scholarship application from the paternal grandparents she has never met. She navigates a sea of new aunts, uncles, and cousins, uncertain whether she will be embraced or met with resistance. Stirring long-buried emotions, reviving tenderness, and uncovering unspoken wounds tied to the past, Marina pieces together the fragmented and often contradictory memories of the parents she barely remembers.

The director of Summer 1993 and Alcarràs, Carla Simón dramatises family dynamics and relationships in ways that feel totally naturalistic and deceptively effortless. The girl at the centre of this story, Marina, is a budding filmmaker, and the story is based on Simón's own life. You can feel this without being told it. She uses voiceover reading out her mother's diary entries over Marina's present-day video camera footage, collapsing time to show the effect of history and memory on this girl in this moment now. It works its way, via some unexpected turns, to a very moving conclusion.

The Little Sister (Dir. Hafsia Herzi)

Fatima, 17, the youngest of three daughters, treads carefully as she searches for her own path, grappling with emerging desires, her attraction to women, and her loyalty to her caring French-Algerian family. Starting university in Paris, she dates, makes friends, and explores a whole new world, all while confronting a timeless and heartrending dilemma: How can one stay true to oneself when reconciling different parts of one’s identity feels impossible?

This is a very well done low-key character drama, exploring the tension in the life of a young French-Algerian Muslim girl who is realising she is gay. The lead performance by Nadia Melliti is great — and in fact she won the Best Actress award from the festival, impressive for a debut. Her performance is quite subtle and insular, but there is a warmth and exuberance to the tone of the film as a whole, so it doesn't ever feel like hard work.

It is refreshing in a film with this kind of set-up that the central character fully embraces her sexuality, and the tension in the film doesn’t come from worrying if she will be ‘found out’, but more the question of whether she will be able to connect the two seemingly separate halves of her life and identity.

The other highlight is the supporting turn by Park Ji-Min from Return to Seoul — she is a great screen presence, and really good here.

The Chronology of Water (Dir. Kristen Stewart)

Brought up in an environment torn apart by violence and alcohol, Lidia Yuknavitch seemed destined for self-destruction and failure until words offered her unexpected freedom in the form of literature. The Chronology of Water, adapted from Yuknavitch’s autobiographical bestseller, follows Lidia’s journey to find her own voice in an exploration of how trauma can be transformed into art through re-possessing our own bloody histories, particularly those uniquely experienced by the bodies of women and girls.

In style, tone and impact, this is very good debut from Kristen Stewart, and its intimate and intense nature feels very in keeping with the way Stewart’s acting style and role choices have developed over the years. It has some of the limitations of a debut — it is arguably overlong and a little repetitive, and the use of rhyming imagery, quick editing and forceful sound design is a bit overdone to begin with. But it is used meaningfully, and as Imogen Poots’ excellent performance is given room to make an impact, the combined effect is powerful and moving. The film feels very personal — there is so much in here about being a woman, being abused, being a sexual creature, being creative and self-conscious, and desiring to be free to assert oneself. It all comes across in distinct moments, and particularly benefits whenever Poots has to carry the weight of it all in her performance, even just in her face.

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