Critics’ Week Lines Up Eleven Features

Two teens—AJ, a shy skateboarder, and Kristin, a go-getter surfer—fall for each other, and all’s well until Kristin falls ill. The French voice cast is led by Lyna Khoudri, Rio Vega, Paul Kircher, and Birane Ba, while Will Sharpe and Stephanie Hsu lead the voice cast of the English-language version.

In Waves is one of four special screenings this year. Julien Gaspar-Oliveri, whose 2020 short Tender Age was nominated for a César, has cast Bastien Bouillon—who also stars in Léa Mysius’s Histoires de la nuit, slated to premiere in competition at Cannes—in Stonewall, the story of a brother and sister grappling with the release of their father from prison. Pierre Le Gall’s Flesh and Fuel is a romantic comedy about two truckers in love starring Alexis Manenti and Julian Świeżewski.

Artistic director Ava Cahen and her team have selected Félix de Givry’s Adieu monde cruel to close out this year’s edition. De Givry cowrote and coproduced Ugo Bienvenu’s Oscar-nominated animated feature Arco (2025), and he’s cast Milo Machado-Graner, the breakout star of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023)—he played Daniel, the visually impaired son of Sandra Hüller and Samuel Theis’s Sandra and Samuel—as a fourteen-year-old who has written a letter to his family and friends announcing his decision to kill himself. When his suicide attempt fails, he goes into hiding, but one of his classmates spots him.

Seven features are set to compete for the Grand Prize, and five of them are directed by women. Blerta Basholli, who won the Grand Jury Prize, the Directing Award, and the Audience Award at Sundance for Hive (2021), has completed her highly anticipated second feature. Set in Pristina on the brink of the Kosovo War in the late 1990s, Dua centers on a thirteen-year-old and her family as their lives are about to be upended.

The Station, revolving around a gas station in Yemen run by women where men, weapons, and talk of politics are banned, is the first feature from Sara Ishaq, whose 2012 documentary short Karama Has No Walls was nominated for an Oscar. In La Gradiva, the first feature from cinematographer Marine Atlan (The Girl in the Snow), a Latin teacher takes a class of high school students on a trip to Pompeii.

Award-winning actor Aina Clotet directs herself in Viva as Nora, a woman recovering from breast cancer and facing a whole new world of possibilities. And Jess Jing Zou’s A Girl Unknown is a story told in three chapters, all centering on a Chinese woman with three names and three families.

Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building, the first fiction feature from documentarian Bruno Santamaría Razo, flashes back to the early 1990s as a filmmaker sorts through memories of being eleven and his father being diagnosed with HIV. And Alexander Murphy’s Tin Castle is a nonfiction portrait of a family of Irish Travellers living in a rundown trailer stranded in the middle of a field.

Critics’ Week 2026 will run from May 13 through 21, and the short film selection will be announced on Wednesday.