The Cannes Film Festival Gives Only A Smidgen of Love To Documentaries

Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux entered the room with a martial bearing, his square jaw tilted upwards in the manner of a man who need not doubt his significance.

He came to the Salon des Ambassadeurs within the Palais to make a few remarks before the awarding of the annual l’Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) award for the festival’s top documentary, as selected by a jury. Before an audience of perhaps a hundred or more nonfiction film lovers, he stated what must be considered unquestionable:

“Documentaries are a minority within the Cannes Film Festival. There have been documentaries in the past, but very few,” Frémaux acknowledged, before adding, “But it’s true that over the past few years, there have been many more.”

He went on to say, “[With] your minority status, you can always feel a little oppressed. You are not. I can reassure you right away that there is proof. The proof, this prize; the proof, this jury, these people who are here.”

Those comforting sentiments aside, it’s hard to argue with the evidence that Cannes sees documentary as secondary to the septième art, or 7^th Art, as the French sometimes call cinema. Of the more than 20 films selected for official competition, not a single one was a documentary. Given that only films In Competition are eligible for the Palme d’or, that means nonfiction films came in with no chance of winning the festival’s most coveted prize. (In Cannes history only two docs have won the Palme d’or – in 2004, for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which was probably awarded more for the film’s political message than its cinematic qualities; and in 1956 for The Silent World, the oceanographic film directed by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle).

Two years ago, it appeared Cannes might be turning a corner in its view of documentary as cinema – inviting not one but two nonfiction films to screen in Competition: Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters and Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring). But then last year it reverted to form, omitting any docs from Competition, a pattern repeated this year. Before 2023, it had been almost 20 years – the Fahrenheit 9/11 year – that Cannes had deigned to admit a documentary to Competition.

Venice and Berlin, the two other most prestigious European festivals, have displayed much less tendency to segregate documentary from fictional cinema.  Indeed, the Berlinale’s Golden Bear has gone to a documentary three times in the last decade: Dahomey, directed by Mati Diop (2024); On the Adamant, directed by Nicolas Philibert (2023), and Fire at Sea, directed by Gianfranco Rosi (2016). Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, sometimes described as docufiction, won the Golden Bear in 2015.

In 2022, the Golden Lion – Venice’s top prize – went to the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, directed by Laura Poitras.

Going back to cinema’s roots in the late 19^th century, the first projected films were essentially documentaries – often referred to as “actualities” back then. Among them were very brief shorts directed by the French Lumière Brothers – Auguste and Louis – “Exiting the Lumière Factory in Lyon” (1895) and “Fishing for Goldfish” (1895). Nanook of the North, the 1922 silent directed by Robert Flaherty, is considered the first documentary feature. Dziga Vertov’s documentary Man with a Movie Camera (1929) has been voted one of the greatest movies of all time – nonfiction or fiction.

Cannes’ l’Oeil d’or prize has only been around for 10 years. This year, the honor went to Imago, directed by Chechen filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev, a film that premiered in Critics Week (Semaine de la Critique) the unofficial Cannes sidebar.

“It’s nice that there are more and more documentaries in Cannes,” Pitsaev told me after winning the l’Oeil d’or, “but it’s maybe time that we’re not in the back room, but that it’s considered just cinema. Wasn’t cinema born in documentary as well?”

Un Certain Regard, an official Cannes sidebar, likewise gave no love to docs. “It’s 20 films,” Pitsaev noted, “and no documentaries.”

The Critics Week jury, comprised of Oscar-winning actor Daniel Kaluuya and others, awarded the French Touch Prize to Imago, praising its subtlety: “It observes but never insists, listens but never forces, captures but never encloses.”

The film was edited by Laurent Sénéchal, the Oscar-nominated editor of Anatomy of a Fall, and fellow award winner Dounia Sichov. Pitsaev said he always meant the film to be cinematic (and thus worthy to be in the company of scripted films).

“The film was financed as a work of cinema, not just a documentary,” he said. “The film was also helped by Arte Cinema, not just Television, but Arte Cinema. People typically ask me, ‘When is it going to be on TV?’ and I just remind them first it’s going to be a theatrical release, so end of October it’s going to be released in cinemas in France. We’re more than happy that people can see the film on a big screen as it was planned. All the collective of the image and also sound, all the work we did, it’s done for cinema, to have the full theatrical experience.”

Cannes does have a section partly devoted to documentary films – Cannes Classics, which programs nonfiction films oriented towards cinema history, directors, and actors. This year’s lineup included Welcome to Lynchland, a film about David Lynch directed by Stéphane Ghez; Bo Being Bo Widerberg, a doc about the Swedish filmmaker directed by Jon Asp and Mattias Nohrborg, and Slauson Rec, a film about Shai LaBeouf’s free theater company in L.A. directed by Leo Lewis O’Neil.

Cannes also slated a couple of documentaries in other sections. Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, Raoul Peck’s film about author George Orwell, bowed as a “Cannes Premiere,” and The Six Billion Dollar Man, Eugene Jarecki’s documentary about Julian Assange and Wikileaks, was slotted as a “Special Screening.” The Six Billion Dollar Man won a Special Jury Prize in honor of the 10^th anniversary of l’Oeil d’or.

“I do think this is a seismic development within the Cannes Film Festival, my movie aside,” Jarecki told me after winning the award. “Just the fact that you can feel the festival leaning into documentary much more than ever before, leaning into the serious issues that are flying around the world right now. If you look at what showed at the festival this year, the dedication of the festival to Fatima [Hassouna, a Palestinian photojournalist killed in Gaza], there’s extremely important stuff going on. And I think the way the psyche of the festival has shifted, we need that… We need more and more people to step up and get concerned and get engaged. And I came here not knowing what to expect of that, of how a festival of poetry and fantasy and romance would be dealing with a modern era where we all have such grave concerns, and they’re leaning into it.”

If Jarecki is right and Cannes takes a more serious turn in the direction of documentary, it can demonstrate that by selecting nonfiction films for Competition. We’ll see if that happens in 2026. Comme disons les français, on verra.

On the basis of past history, I would argue Cannes remains all about poetry, fantasy, and romance as embodied by the spectacle of the red carpet (le tapis rouge) and the stars ascending the stairs to the Palais, where they are typically greeted by Thierry Frémaux. That’s the beating heart of Cannes. Documentaries, for the most part, lack the inherent glamour that constitutes Cannes’ true identity.