Each year at the Cannes Film Festival, the Queer Palm is awarded to recognize LGBTQIA+ cinema across the festival’s official and parallel sections. The 2026 selection, consisting of a record-breaking 21 feature nominees, highlights the importance of queer stories in cinema. In Marie Madeleine by Gessica Généus, religion, sex work, and homosexuality clash in Haiti. In Queer Palm winner Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun, the trashy slasher film genre of the 80s becomes a vehicle to rethink anti-trans scholarship through an examination of self-identification at the intersection of horror, sex and queerness. In Flesh and Fuel by Pierre Le Gall, the long-distance romance between two gay truckers is tested by the hardships of working-class labor. These films came together at Cannes to showcase the current concerns in global queer cinema.
Tag Archives: Cannes 2026
Cannes 2026 Review: “Dua”
Blerta Basholli’s follow-up to her 2021 Sundance winner Hive, Dua, delivers a portrait of a teenage girl’s daily routine as disrupted by the increasing marginalisation she experiences in her own environment during the Kosovo War. The film is set in late 1990s Prishtina, where Kosovar Albanian families live under Serbian police violence and the constant threat of exile. Dua (Pinea Matoshi), thirteen, wants the ordinary freedoms of early adolescence. She wants to belong at school, to understand her changing body and to move through her city without fear.
obviouslyreviews.com 