The Queer Palm awarding Cannes Festival films has this year distinguished two feature-length titles: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Oil in the Arteries.
Following a night of electric prize-giving on Vilebrequin Beach, this Friday, May 22, the lesbian horror film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma won the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. After its enchanting trans allegory I Saw the TV Glow in 2024, Jane Schoenbrun asserts her talent as a filmmaker with this passionate romance, doubled with a love letter to the slashers of the 1980s. A rich and cheerfully offbeat film that gives its actresses, Hannah Einbinder (from the series Hacks) and Gillian Anderson, a completely wild playground.
“For an entire generation, the slasher has structured a relationship to sexuality, to the body, to adolescence, to death, to difference. Horror cinema, its narrative patterns, its motifs, thrill, but have also served as a vehicle for misogyny, transphobia…,” justifies the Queer Palm 2026 jury, co-chaired by Thomas Jolly and Anna Mouglalis alongside Raya Martigny, Andre Fischer and Jehnny Beth. “Rather than condemn, the direction proposes to repair. To reclaim a genre pushed to the margins of cinema—and to make it a tool for today. A popular, jubilant, well-documented cinema, freed from heteronormative formatting, heterocentric that ties this cinematic genre to other narratives, other bodies, other journeys. In this instance, that of two women on the path to reconciling with their sexuality.”
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