The dark side of Mallorca's sun and beach tourism. This is what Mallorcan producer Luis Ortas wanted to explore when he launched the project Mallorca Confidential, the criminal thriller directed by David Ilundain, which premieres this Friday with a superb Lolita playing the matriarch of a clan of drug traffickers from a gypsy settlement in Mallorca. Around this multi-layered character, who establishes herself as the leader of the settlement but has her own agenda of interests, the film depicts the ecosystem of police, business, and political corruption that sustains drug trafficking, but above all, a family story of sacrifice and betrayal in which a young gypsy woman (Asia Ortega), the matriarch's niece, must decide her loyalties.

Cristian Mungiu joins the exclusive list of filmmakers with two Palme d'Or awards. Nineteen years after winning the first with Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, the Romanian filmmaker has once again triumphed at the Cannes Film Festival with Fjord, where he leaves his native Romania to travel to Norway and recount the drama of an evangelical and ultra-conservative Romanian family whose children are taken away by the progressive Norwegian social services when they discover that the father –Sebastian Stan, who recovers his native Romanian here– physically punishes them.

Undoubtedly, one of the trends of this edition of the Cannes Film Festival is the prominence of LGBTI relationships, present in eight titles in the official competition. The film where the theme is most central has been, of course, La bola negra by the Javis, but also La vie d’une femme, with a superb Léa Drucker as a surgeon who falls in love for the first time with another woman, and, above all, Coward, where Lukas Dhont explores the trenches of the First World War as a space where dissident sexualities find cracks to exist.

A Viva, the film with which Aina Clotet has won the revelation award at the Critics' Week in Cannes, the protagonist is a biologist who studies how to extend life to 120 years. And, almost as if it were a sequel to this film, in the other opera prima by a Catalan director premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, The end of it by a Catalan director premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, The end of it begins with the protagonist's birthday, an artist who reluctantly celebrates reaching 250 years old because she is tired of the perennial joy that surrounds her, of her friends, and of living forever. So her new artistic project, which will also be her last, will consist of dying, an announcement that shocks the entire society. For the director, we live in a world that “denies and tries to hide death” and in which youth is idealized as if it were the only desirable state of life. “It is absurd to think of youth as the peak of life, because in reality it passes very quickly –points out Martínez Bayona–. Organizing life like this doesn't help much to continue valuing what you do and who you are.”

In the last poem of the Sonetos del amor oscuro, Federico García Lorca wrote: “Tú nunca entenderás lo que te quiero / porque duermes en mí y estás dormido”. To Javier Calvo, the upper half of the artistic duo known as els Javis, the letter o at the end of dormido particularly caught his attention. “I read it as an adolescent and thought it was a typo, but no, it said dormido, not dormida, and it referred to a man –he explains–. But in school textbooks, it was omitted that Lorca was gay, as if it were a shame or as if it were not important to explain who he was. And we must remember that he was murdered, among other things, for being homosexual. It has not been sufficiently explained that the second most important author in Spanish literature is gay, nor from what pain and what wound his work came from”.

Cannes definitely brings luck to Aina Clotet. When she presented the series Això no és Suècia at the Canneseries festival, she won the award for best actress, and three years later she has won the Revelation Award at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes for her first film as a director, Viva, which she also stars in. "Thank you for believing in our film and for opening doors to the world for us," said Clotet as she took the stage at the Miramar space this Wednesday to receive the award, which the Semaine de la Critique presents together with the Louis Roederer Foundation and which last year was won by the film Nino by the French Pauline Loquès.

One year after premiering Romería there, Carla Simón has returned to the Cannes Film Festival with a freshly baked short film: Flamenco, produced by Icex, the public body that promotes the internationalization of Spanish companies. Starring choreographer and bailaora Rocío Molina and with musical direction by Niño de Elche, the work, which can now be seen on Icex's website, serves as a rehearsal for the director's next feature film, for which she is preparing a flamenco musical.

In an edition of the Cannes Film Festival where, despite rumors, we finally haven't had a new film by Lars von Trier, the quota of extreme cinema that infuriates a good part of the press has been well covered by another Danish director who usually provokes as much indignation as enthusiasm: Nicolas Winding Refn has presented outside of competition the magnificent Her private hell, a further step in the path that increasingly distances him from conventional narrative cinema and from directing another Drive. The film is a freefall that takes to the extreme the aesthetic approach to the horror tale from the previous the previous The neon demon, with an even thinner plot and hieratic to operatic performances. After seeing what will surely be one of the most radical films of the festival, it is better understood why Thierry Frémaux did not feel he had the courage to program it in the official competition.

There were many expectations placed on the second film that Léa Seydoux is premiering in the official competition of this edition of Cannes, Léa Seydoux in the official competition of this edition of Cannes, L’inconnue. Partly, it is due to the presence of the French actress, who at 40 years old is already a festival legend: she has presented sixteen films here since 2010 – almost one per year – and won a Palme d'Or for Blue is the Warmest Colour alongside Adèle Exarchopoulos, whom Seydoux applauded on Sunday at the end of the gala screening of the gala screening of Garance. But there was also anticipation to see L’inconnue because it is Arthur Harari's first film after the Oscar for the screenplay of Anatomy of a Fall, the 2023 Palme d'Or that he co-wrote with Justine Triet.

Someone wrote on Twitter –it was still called that then– a few hours after the first screening of La vida de Adèle,, at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, that Adèle Exarchopoulos was, quite simply, the best actress in the world. And that impression was conveyed by the young debutante in that torrential and wonderful film, that year's Palme d'Or winner, exceptionally shared by the director (Abdellatif Kechiche) and the two leads, Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux.

For fans of North American cinema that combines the narrative vigor of film genres and the authorial ambition of the seventies generation, this Sunday was an important day at the Cannes Film Festival, because a new film by James Gray, responsible for films like Two Lovers or Ad Astra, and arguably the most undervalued North American director of recent decades. In France, however, critics and the public love him, and so does the Cannes Film Festival, which has screened Paper Tiger with all honors, a masterful drama about a New York family who, at the end of the summer of 1986, unexpectedly finds themselves in the crosshairs of the dangerous Russian mafia.

With the permission of Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish director most loved in France in recent times is surely Rodrigo Sorogoyen (Madrid, 1981), who just a few days ago received the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government and has triumphed in French cinemas with titles such as El reino or As bestas. The culmination of his love story with France is the participation in the Cannes competition of his new film, El ser querido, which premieres this Saturday both at the festival and in French cinemas, an unusual fact for a Spanish production that will not reach our country until August.

Seventy-five years after Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, the Costa Brava continues to be a magnet for international film shoots. But this time, we don't see Ava Gardner strolling through Tossa de Mar, but rather Marion Cotillard in Port de la Selva, in one of the films being presented out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival these days, Karma, directed by her now ex-husband Guillaume Canet, from whom she separated shortly after filming the movie.

What a brave and exciting film has been directed by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Soudain, which premiered this Friday in the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival, has the audacity to take all the time and words it needs to reflect on a theme as uncinematic as the care of people with neurological diseases, and it does so through a beautiful story of friendship between two women, the director of a nursing home in Paris who introduces a new humanitarian philosophy at the center (Virginie Efira) and a Japanese theater director with terminal breast cancer (Tao Okamoto).

In 2020, a still unknown Berta Cusó (Barcelona, 1989) was a finalist for the Premi ARA de Còmic. She felt no sadness for not winning, but rather excitement for a career that was just beginning with that short comic strip (Paral·lel) and which now also includes two magnificent long comics: La conca dels àngels (Pagès, 2025), which has just won the first edition of the Vinyeta Ficomic award, and the recent L’extraordinària història del Circ Cric (Andana, 2026), winner of the València graphic novel award.

If with Scream horror cinema entered its meta phase, with Teenage sex & death at Camp Miasma, which opened the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, the genre enters a new phase of hyper-reflection and absolute self-awareness. Jane Schoenbrun's film is a love letter to the slasher subgenre of the 80s – that of sagas like Friday the 13th, Halloween, or A Nightmare on Elm Street – and, at the same time, a relentless satire full of cinephile jokes about Hollywood's current obsession with remakes and reboots. But, above all, it is something unprecedented in 2026: a vindication of the Dionysian power of horror cinema, which was the audiovisual space in which various generations of teenagers –especially those of the 80s video stores– experienced their sexual awakening amidst predictable stimuli (female nudity, heteronormative sex) and less common ones (psychopathic killers, liters of blood, violent deaths).

In the first scene of Viva, the opera prima by director Aina Clotet, who also stars in it, the actress appears uncomfortable and naked in the hospital, where the character she plays is undergoing the final test to complete her breast cancer treatment. The close-up of the mastectomy scar is the first sign that Clotet is going all out in this film about the intense desire to live of Nora, a scientific researcher who, after seeing death up close, feels the need to shake up her life and, as one must start somewhere, cheats on her husband with a much younger man with a sculpted physique.

In an edition of the Cannes Film Festival marked by the scarce Hollywood muscle of its programming, New Zealand director Peter Jackson has been the big star of the festival's opening. The patriarch of the franchise of The Lord of the Rings received an honorary Palme d'Or during the opening ceremony this Tuesday. It was presented to him by one of the saga's actors, Elijah Wood, who recalled the moment Jackson "changed his life" by choosing him to play Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). "And I know I am not, by a long shot, the only person whose life Peter Jackson has changed," he added.

10,000 euros is the prize that the winning comic strip of the seventh edition of the Premi ARA de Còmic will take home. L’ARA is calling for a new edition of the competition that promotes the creation of comic strips in Catalan with the aim of normalizing the presence of Catalan in the comic market, in which, despite the growth in recent years, the offer in Catalan continues to be much more minority than in other disciplines such as literature, theater or music. The initiative has the support of the Department of Linguistic Policy of the Generalitat, and the bases of the call can be consulted on the website Premicomic.ara.cat.

“Incredible!”, exclaims a man as he removes the virtual reality visor. “What the hell?”, blurts out a girl next to him. These are the first reactions from one of the groups that this Tuesday took the tour of The black mirror experience, the virtual reality installation participating in the Cannes Immersive section of the Cannes Film Festival. For 45 minutes, the six people in the group virtually travel through a futuristic flagship store to collect and personalize a life agent, a kind of personal assistant designed to “make the buyer’s life goals a reality”. Whatever they may be: fame, recognition, riches...