What I saw at Cannes 2025

The world is in crisis, and cinema is listening and responding, writes N Vidyashankar back from the just concluded festival

The 78th edition of the Cannes International Film Festival unfolded against a turbulent global backdrop — reflecting both the fractured state of the world and cinema’s enduring power to interrogate, reflect, and occasionally offer hope.

Like the previous years, the festival maintained its identity as a cultural crossroad — a space where art, commerce, politics, and aesthetics converge. However, what distinguished Cannes 2025 was its heightened tone of urgency, its immersion in geopolitical dread, and a curatorial ethos that leaned heavily into contemporary anxieties.

The thematic through-line across many films was clear: the world is in turmoil. From the threat of another World War to climate disaster, fascist resurgence, and technological dystopia — this year’s films were steeped in existential unease. The darkness mirrored not only current headlines but also a broader, almost universal psychological fatigue.

This preoccupation was evident in works like Oliver Laxe’s ‘Sirât’, a post-apocalyptic Moroccan desert saga that felt like a fever dream from our not-so-distant future. Laxe described the film as a meditation on modern chaos, depicting a rave-turned-exodus amidst civil unrest. Similarly, Ari Aster’s ‘Eddington’ drew direct inspiration from America’s sociopolitical unravelling, portraying a town devoured by conspiracy theories and digital delusion.

Raoul Peck’s ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5’ stood out for its documentary examination of creeping authoritarianism. While its central argument — that George Orwell’s vision has become reality — might feel familiar, Peck’s framing of AI as the new surveillance state added fresh urgency. By connecting Orwell’s legacy to the Black Lives Matter movement, Gaza, and modern-day propaganda, Peck reinforced the idea that dystopia is not ahead of us — it is now.

A curious Cannes tradition received critical reflection this year: the standing ovation. Once rare, these ovations — now sometimes stretching to 20 minutes — have become performative rituals. The Hollywood Reporter critic Gary Baum argued that they mask cinema’s declining cultural relevance, replacing critical discourse with orchestrated adulation. The practice, reinforced by the festival’s camera and media coverage, may reflect a desperation to sustain cinema’s mythos amid shrinking audience attention and growing scepticism about film’s real-world impact.

This phenomenon has led some to question whether Cannes is becoming a museum of affectation rather than a vital arena of critical thought. As public booing has virtually disappeared, replaced by choreographed praise, the festival risks becoming disconnected from authentic audience engagement.

More than ever, this year’s films positioned themselves as political acts. From Robert De Niro denouncing Trump as a “philistine president” at the opening ceremony to awarding the Palme d’Or to the Iranian revenge drama ‘It Was Just an Accident’, by the celebrated but politically hounded Jafar Panahi, Cannes reinforced its historical role as a bastion of resistance art.

Peck’s documentary directly tackled the Trump administration and drew Orwellian comparisons to contemporary US politics. Films such as ‘Two Prosecutors’, by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ‘The Secret Agent’, and Tarik Saleh’s ‘Eagles of the Republic’ revisited historical traumas to illuminate present-day political conditions — be it Stalinist terror or Brazil’s military dictatorship or Egyptian changes of guard.

Meanwhile, climate change reared its head in more speculative works like the French animated feature ‘Arco’, in which a boy from the far future glimpses a world defined by environmental collapse and technological dependency. Bright and imaginative, ‘Arco’ stood out by injecting optimism into the festival’s otherwise sombre tone.

Despite the overarching gravity, Cannes 2025 did not ignore the pleasures of cinema. Richard Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’, a playful homage to Jean-Luc Godard, served as a love letter to French cinema and a nostalgic breather amidst the chaos. Tom Cruise’s return with ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ electrified the Red path with blockbuster glamour, demonstrating Cannes’s enduring symbiosis with Hollywood spectacle.

This contradiction — between escapist entertainment and cultural reckoning — defined Cannes 2025. The festival oscillated between solemn reflection and giddy celebration, from meditations on fascism to gender-bending horror-comedies like ‘The Plague’, which offered subversive laughter in a genre setting.

A notable trend at this year’s festival was the emergence of actors-turned-directors. Harris Dickinson’s ‘Urchin’, a gritty metaphysical urban tale, garnered critical praise, while Kristen Stewart’s ‘The Chronology of Water’ showcased a deft command of cinematic language. Scarlett Johansson’s highly anticipated ‘Eleanor the Great’ was also premiered, and was noticed for eliciting strong performances from the actors — led by 94 year old June Squibb.

Cinematically, the festival embraced retro aesthetics with the boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio appearing in several films. Whether used to evoke claustrophobia or nostalgia, this visual motif reflected the thematic contraction of hope and space — fitting for a festival wrapped in global tension.

Despite commercialisation and red carpet distractions, Cannes remains a forum of serious cultural inquiry. It reflects the enduring question: can cinema change the world, or at least shift our understanding of it?

This year’s offerings suggest that while the medium’s power may be diminished by market forces and technological upheaval, its soul is very much intact. The presence of deeply personal films — Joachim Trier’s Norwegian film ‘Sentimental Value’, Saeed Roustaee’s mainstream Iranian drama ‘Woman and Child’, Masha Schilinski’s German presentation ‘Sound of Falling’, Tunisian film ‘The Little Sister’ by Hafsia Herzi, ‘History of Sound’ by the American indie filmmaker Oliver Hermanus, and formally ambitious films like Wes Anderson’s ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ — showed that filmmakers continue to explore cinema’s potential as both mirror and hammer. 

Cannes 2025 was a contradiction in motion: despairing yet hopeful, nostalgic yet forward-looking, performative yet piercingly sincere. It showcased the kind of cultural schizophrenia that defines our era — and perhaps cinema’s unique capacity to navigate it. In this context, it is imperative to make a reference to the Indian entry at Cannes in Un Certain regard section, Neeraj Ghaywan’s ‘Homebound’. On its single canvas, it tries to navigate through all the issues that plague contemporary India, from casteism, communalism to migration of the marginalised in times of natural and manmade disasters and political jingoism. It drew enormous attention for its content but also invited critical discourse for its broad and over ambitious canvas.

What remains clear is that cinema continues to be one of the few spaces where artistes from across the globe can challenge narratives, evoke empathy, and remind us — even in our fractured state — of our shared humanity. If this year’s festival had a message, it was this: the world is in crisis, but cinema is still listening, looking at — and responding.

(The author is a well-known film critic and artistic director of BIFFes)