For its 16th edition, the Queer Palm selection counts 21 feature films, signaling a particularly queer harvest for the Cannes Film Festival as a whole. Champagne!
Less than two weeks before the opening of the Cannes Film Festival 2026, on May 12, the Queer Palm committee published its selection. Twenty-one films are this year in competition for the prize rewarding each year two films (one short and one feature) with LGBT or feminist perspectives, drawn from the official Cannes selection and its parallel sections. “I remember that we only had five or six films in the first year, says Franck Finance-Madureira, founder of the Queer Palm. This record number proves that queer subjects are becoming banalized more and more. We are witnessing a form of normalization in cinema.”
At the end of the twelve days that the Cannes Film Festival lasts, the jury will decide which feature film will win the 16th Queer Palm. This year it is co-chaired by actress Anna Mouglalis and director Thomas Jolly – who, in addition, will oversee the next tour of Drag Race France in the fall. The duo will be accompanied by André Fischer, creator and director of the MixBrasil Festival of Culture of Diversity, Jehnny Beth, musician and actress notably encountered in Anatomy of a Fall or Split, and Raya Martigny, multidisciplinary artist who won, at the end of 2025, the Reinvention of the Year prize at the Têtu ceremony.
Here is the exhaustive list of the films in competition – across all sections – for the Queer Palm 2026:
- – The Man I Love by Ira Sachs
- – A Few Days in Nagi by Kōji Fukada
- – Garance by Jeanne Herry
- – Coward by Lukas Dhont
- – Autofiction by Pedro Almodóvar
- – La Bola Negra by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo
- – The Life of a Woman by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
- – Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun
- – Club Kid by Jordan Firstman
- – Elephants in the Mist by Abinash Bikram Shah
- – The Wonderful Mornings by Avril Besson
- – Tangles by Leah Nelson
- – Jim Queen by Nicolas Athané and Margo Nguyen
- – Roma Elastica by Bertrand Mandico
- – Marie Madeleine by Gessica Généus
- – Oil in the Arteries by Pierre Le Gall
- – La Gradiva by Marine Atlan
- – Six Months in the Pink Building with Blue by Bruno Santamaría Razo
- – Secret Heart by Tom Fontenille
- – Turns by Céline Carridroit and Aline Suter
- – Clarissa by Chuko Esiri and Arie Esiri
On the Official Selection side of the festival, seven films out of the twenty-two in competition include LGBTQI+ stakes or characters, led by filmmakers who are just as such as Lukas Dhont, Pedro Almodóvar, Ira Sachs, or the duo Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo.
cinéma | Festival de Cannes | Queer palm | culture | news
