Winner of the L’Œil d’Or for best documentary at the 79th Cannes Film Festival 2026, where it premiered as a Special Screening, Rehearsals for a Revolution is the debut feature by Iranian actress and director Pegah Ahangarani. Built entirely from personal archives, home videos, protest footage, animations and voice recordings, the film traces over four decades of Iranian history through five portraits of people who shaped Pegah Ahangarani‘s life, relatives and mentors whose individual stories mirror the cycles of repression and resistance that have defined the country since 1979. Sentenced to eighteen months in prison in 2013 and a refugee in the United Kingdom since 2022, Pegah Ahangarani turns her own biography into a lens through which a nation’s unfinished revolution comes into focus.

The idea for “Rehearsals for a Revolution” goes back six years, but Pegah Ahangarani knew from the start that she wanted a film made entirely of narration and archival material, with no conventional on-camera interviews. To test whether that approach could sustain itself, she made a short film, “I’m Trying to Remember”, which premiered at IDFA. “That project was successful, and then I made the first chapter of this feature, which premiered at IDFA. Gradually, I gained the confidence that I could carry a 90-minute film forward using this subjective approach of voice and archive as image”.

When the project began, Pegah Ahangarani had no children. Midway through the edit, she discovered she was pregnant, and something shifted. She told her editor, Arash, in secret, and proposed a new dimension for the film. “I told him, ‘I have a secret to confess: I’m pregnant… maybe the film could turn into a sort of letter to my child.’ I didn’t want it to be explicitly a ‘letter-film,’ but I wanted to convey the idea that these are all stories we must tell the next generation”. That impulse, the need to pass memory forward, became the emotional spine of the entire project.

Asked whether the future of Iran lies with its women, Pegah Ahangarani does not hesitate. She points to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement as something unprecedented in the country’s history. “People took to the streets with a clear demand and brought what they wanted for the future into the present moment. They took off their veils and burned them that very night”. What struck her most was the movement’s intelligence: rather than describing a desired future, the protesters enacted it. Pegah Ahangarani sees this as the most progressive chapter in forty years of uprisings, and she is unequivocal about what it means: if Iran changes, it will be because of its women.

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Presented at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, “Che Guevara: The Last Companions” is the debut feature by Christophe Dimitri Reveille, a documentary that took over twenty years to complete. The film reconstructs the untold aftermath of Che Guevara’s execution in Bolivia in 1967, when his last surviving companions, three Cuban guerrilla fighters, undertook a gruelling 2,400-kilometre escape across Bolivia, hunted by thousands of soldiers. Through rare archival footage, animation and exclusive interviews with the protagonists themselves, as well as members of the Bolivian army and a CIA operative, Christophe Dimitri Reveille pieces together a story that has remained largely invisible for sixty years. At its core, the film asks what revolution means for those who live in its shadow, the people who followed, protected and ultimately lost the man they believed in.

Christophe Dimitri Reveille‘s journey into this story began with a book and a single encounter. In 2004, he met Benigno, one of Che’s closest companions, and spent over two years co-writing his biography. A graphic novel followed, then the idea of a documentary, initially just about Benigno. It was a conversation with Benicio del Toro, who had played Che in Steven Soderbergh‘s film and knew Benigno personally, that shifted the scale of the project. “He was like, ‘You met Benigno, but you’re doing a documentary about Benigno? You should do a documentary about all of them.’ But it’s impossible to meet all of them because even meeting one is hard. But then he put a seed in my brain”. From that point on, Christophe Dimitri Reveille began tracking down every surviving companion, one by one.

To ask the right questions, Christophe Dimitri Reveille immersed himself in every available account of the Bolivian campaign: biographies, military histories, previous interviews. At each stage of the guerrillas’ journey from the death of Guevara to their return to Cuba, he found specialists who had spent a decade or more on a single episode. “I met someone who did huge work about the Bolivian army for 15 years. At each step of the journey, I was able to find five or six people like me who worked 10 years on that specific moment”. Their knowledge helped Christophe Dimitri Reveille to build a fuller picture with every conversation.

In the film, Christophe Dimitri Reveille draws a distinction between what the Bolivians lost and what the Cubans lost when Che was killed. The Bolivian fighters lost a commander. The Cubans lost something far more intimate, a man who had given them purpose when they had nothing, who had been at their side for a decade, and whom they had been sent to protect. “When he died, they fell. They fell politically. They had to go back to Cuba and say to Castro, ‘Sorry, we were supposed to protect him and we failed'”. That first night in the forest after the execution, Christophe Dimitri Reveille says, the Cubans were not just escaping an army, they were walking away from the centre of their lives.

One of the film’s most striking qualities is its refusal to settle on a single version of events. Each companion carries his own Che, his own reading of the revolution, his own account of what went wrong. Christophe Dimitri Reveille embraces this multiplicity without pretending to resolve it. When asked during a funding meeting whether he had found the truth, he answered honestly: “I’m not pretentious. I don’t know the truth, but I can say the truth is somewhere here”. At the end of twenty years, Christophe Dimitri Reveille says, “I have many more questions than answers”.

Asked whether “The Last Companions” is an homage to the unseen figures behind every revolution, Christophe Dimitri Reveille confirms. The film, he says, is for everyone who works in the shadow.

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Presentato nella Sezione Ufficiale in concorso al 79º Festival di Cannes, Amarga Navidad è il nuovo film scritto e diretto da Pedro Almodóvar. Nel cast, accanto a Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Victoria Luengo, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Milena Smit, Patrick Criado e Quim Gutiérrez, c’è ancora una volta Rossy de Palma, musa del regista manchego dai tempi de “La legge del desiderio”. Quasi quattro decenni dopo quel primo incontro nella Movida madrilena, Rossy de Palma resta una presenza insostituibile nell’universo almodovariano. Prodotto da El Deseo e distribuito da Warner Bros Pictures Italia, il film, dopo Cannes, è arrivato nelle sale italiane il 21 maggio.

Per Rossy de Palma, quello che Pedro Almodóvar ha fatto per i personaggi femminili nel cinema va ben oltre una questione di rappresentazione. Quello che lei apprezza è qualcosa di più profondo: la liberazione dal senso di colpa. “Pedro mi è sempre piaciuto perché offre alle donne la possibilità di essere libere internamente, specialmente dal senso di colpevolezza. Le donne di Pedro possono attraversare le esperienze più orribili, come un incubo, ma poi decidono di lasciarsele alle spalle e di andare avanti con gioia. Non c’è vittimismo”. Oggi, riconosce, è più facile parlare di personaggi femminili complessi, ma quando Pedro Almodóvar ha cominciato non era affatto così. Per questo lo considera un regalo immenso per tutte le donne.

L’orgoglio di far parte di quell’universo si mescola, a 61 anni, con un rapporto che ha cambiato forma. Se prima Pedro Almodóvar era quasi un padre, ora Rossy de Palma si sente quasi materna nei suoi confronti. Nel corso degli anni ha incontrato moltissime persone che l’hanno ringraziata per il lavoro del regista. Con “La legge del desiderio”, ricorda, è stata la prima volta che si vedevano due uomini fare l’amore sullo schermo; molti omosessuali nel mondo non avevano quel tipo di rappresentazione e grazie a quel film hanno capito che ciò che provavano non era sbagliato. “Pedro ha aperto molte finestrelle nella società. Il cinema è la scusa per cambiare il mondo”.

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Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz, already noted for her short films, is one of the contenders for the Caméra d’Or with “Madame”, screened at the 79th Cannes Film Festival as part of the Special Screenings. To discuss this fascinating chamber piece co-written with Pauline Guéna (author of the story behind Dominik Moll’s excellent “The Night of the 12th”) which unfolds (almost) entirely in a private mansion located in the so-called “Golden Triangle”, the most luxurious area in Paris. The French director is joined by her actress Malou Khebizi, who plays Laura, the tough factotum who looks after Souria (played by Soundos Mosbah), the mistress of the Saudi sheikh who lives shut away in this house, in “obscene” luxury (to use the director’s own word) but under surveillance, with only Laura and a man, Emre (Ziad Bakri), for company. The actress tells us more about how she related to the character and approached her complexity.

Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz explains that she experienced the unusual situation of Laura’s character firsthand and actually entered this world we typically never see, after which she carried out extensive research, into the world of servicing luxury clients on one side, and also on cases of Saudi (and other) women who fled such situations, also drawing on the work of sociologist Alizée Delpierre and journalist Hélène Coutard.

Asked about the opposition or symmetry between the characters of Laura and Souria, the director specifies: “What really infused all the writing and the construction of the two characters, these two relationships to being a woman, is the confrontation of two femininities that are pitted against each other but eventually, in both cases, deemed never enough. That is to say, whether you’re a woman who refuses to endorse the trappings of femininity (for example who is into being strong and grounded, as is the case with Laura’s character) or a woman who ‘performs’ a certain hyper-femininity (thus taking on the idea of somehow wearing a mask), well, in both cases, it’s never enough, it’s never right… And I can say I have been both, so I was interested in setting these two face to face, because I think the line is thin between these two ways of ‘performing’ one’s condition.”

As for the character of Souria, and what leads her to accept these living conditions, Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz comments: “I wanted us to discover her little by little, for her not to be a character reduced to the stereotype she invokes. As women, we often accept living conditions, even relationships, that don’t suit us, in the sense that I’ve frequently found myself in situations where as a woman, I’d say to myself, ‘theoretically, I don’t agree with what I’m experiencing, and I don’t think it’s normal.’ And yet, that doesn’t prevent you from accepting these situations… As women, we regularly find ourselves in situations we could question, and yet we are also rooted in them, and it’s an entire journey we have to undertake, a collective journey as women. We need to… break free from these patterns, and having a character like Souria, who is aware of what she’s accepting, and in exchange for what, that interested me.”

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Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz, remarquée pour ses courts-métrages, est en lice pour la Caméra d’or avec “Le Triangle d’or“, présenté au 79e Festival de Cannes parmi les séances spéciales. Pour nous parler de ce fascinant huis clos coscénarisé avec Pauline Guéna (auteure du récit à l’origine de l’excellent “La Nuit du 12” de Dominik Moll) qui se joue (presque) entièrement dans un hôtel particulier situé dans le “Triangle d’or”, une zone considérée comme la plus luxueuse de Paris, située dans le 8e arrondissement, la réalisatrice française est accompagnée de sa comédienne Malou Khebizi, qui joue ici Laura, la coriace femme à tout faire qui s’occupe de Souria (incarnée par Soundos Mosbah), la maîtresse du cheick saoudien qui vit enfermée dans cette maison, dans un luxe “obscène” (pour reprendre le mot de la réalisatrice) mais sous surveillance, avec pour seule compagnie Laura et un homme, Emre (Ziad Bakri). L’actrice nous en dit plus sur la manière dont elle s’est rapportée au personnage et dont elle avait abordé sa complexité.

Rosselet-Ruiz explique qu’elle a vécu la situation étonnante du personnage de Laura, pénétré elle-même cet univers sur lequel on ne pose typiquement jamais les yeux, et fait ensuite d’amples recherches d’une part sur le monde du service de clients de luxe, et d’autre part sur des cas de femmes saoudiennes (et autres) qui ont fui des situations de ce type, notamment s’appuyant sur le travail de la sociologue Alizée Delpierre et de la journaliste Hélène Coutard.

Interrogée sur l’opposition ou la symétrie des personnages de Laura et Souria, la réalisatrice précise : “Ce qui a vraiment traversé l’écriture et la construction des deux personnages, ces deux rapports au féminin, la confrontation de deux féminités qu’on oppose et qui dans les deux cas, sont considérés comme jamais assez. C’est-à-dire que quand on est une femme et qu’on refuse les attraits de la féminité (qu’on est dans quelque chose de l’ordre de la puissance et d’une incarnation très ancrée, comme c’est le cas du personnage de Laura) ou quand on est une femme qui ‘performe’ une certaine hyperféminité (qui prend en charge, presque, quelque chose chose qui est l’ordre du masque), eh bien en fait dans les deux cas, c’est pas assez, c’est pas bien… or moi, dans mon parcours, j’ai été l’une et l’autre, et donc ça m’intéressait de les mettre l’une face à l’autre, parce que je pense (qu’il y a une porosité) entre ces deux manières de ‘performer’ sa condition.”

Par rapport au personnage de Souria, et à ce qui l’amène à accepter ces conditions de vie, Rosselet-Ruiz commente : “J’avais envie qu’on la découvre petit à petit, que ce ne soit pas un personnage qui s’arrête à son cliché. En tant que femme, on accepte souvent des conditions de vie, et même de relation, qui ne nous conviennent pas, dans le sens où moi j’ai été beaucoup confrontée à des situations où en tant que femme, je me disais ‘théoriquement, je ne suis pas d’accord avec ce que je suis en train de vivre, et je trouve que ce n’est pas normal’, et pour autant ça n’empêche pas qu’on puisse accepter de vivre ces situations… En tant que femme, on se retrouve régulièrement dans des situations qu’on pourrait remettre en cause, et pour autant, on est aussi ancrée dans ça, et c’est tout un parcours, tout un chemin de vie, qui est un chemin collectif en tant que femmes, de s’approprier de ces choses-là et comment on y répond, pour se sortir de ces schémas, et d’avoir un personnage comme Souria, qui est consciente de ce qu’elle accepte et en échange de quoi, ça m’intéressait.”

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La directora (también guionista y productora) chilena Dominga Sotomayor, quien hizo su primer largometraje, “De jueves a domingo”, en 2012 y se convirtió, al final del Festival internacional de cine de Locarno de 2018, en la primera mujer en ganar el Leopardo para Mejor Dirección, con “Tarde para morir joven”, acudió a la Quincena de Cineastas del 79º Festival Internacional de Cine de Cannes con “La perra”, un retrato de mujer adaptado de la novela de la escritora colombiana Pilar Quintana, dibujado a pinceladas a través de momentos de su vida en los paisajes impresionantes de una isla chilena remota, de su relación con su perra, y de unas canciones populares de las que se escuchan en la televisión. 

Una película de escenas: “Yo pensé en esta película como muy episódica… me parecía muy interesante jugar con una estructura que es muy diferente a mis películas anteriores, que es más episódica, que tiene escenas fuertes, y que uno pueda conectar libremente como espectador.”

Sobre el lugar increíble que es la isla donde se ubica toda la obra: “A mí me motivaba inventar una isla, una isla que no existe. Parte de la inspiración viene de esta isla, Santa María, que encontramos, pero también hay otras locaciones que son del continente, y inventamos una geografía. Tiene que ver con lo que me interesa en el cine, y que es como inventar un territorio, imaginar un tiempo. También la película tiene un tiempo muy indefinido porque como es una isla, está un poco detenida en el tiempo, el pasado en esta isla también es un tiempo medio extraño. Creo que hay un juego ahí con esa indefinición del lugar, esa indefinición del tiempo“.

Un paisaje “muy protagónico”, sin ser simbólico: “Me gusta observar en horizontal todos esos elementos, entonces la perra, Silvia, el mar, las algas, el paisaje, esta todo ahí como en un mismo plano y no son elementos que quieren simbolizar: son elementos que dialogan.”

Sobre el tipo de exploración que propone “La Perra”: “En las otras películas con perros, en general, hay una idea más romantizada, más humanizada de la relación [con el perro]…, del amigo fiel y aquí lo que me atrajo de este libro de Pilar Quintana, justamente, es que había una mirada más cruda y más realista sobre lo que puede ser la conexión con un animal, que es más salvaje y que tiene momentos luminosos, pero también tiene momentos oscuros y entonces quería hacer esta película sin un tema clausurado sino como una exploración de lo que gatilla esta mujer solitaria.”

“Yo quería crear un personaje enigmático, y una película que también es enigmática… No me interesaba hacer como una película sicologista que trataría de entender al personaje, sino más bien observar estos elementos y este personaje como un sistema más horizontal: hay un perro, hay una mujer, hay algas, hay mar, hay naturaleza y como dialoga todo esto. [Quería] tratar, de alguna manera, de estar cerca de algo vivo y de una experiencia también diferente a las películas que yo he hecho antes.”

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After “I Have Electric Dreams”, which collected three Leopards at Locarno 2022, for best direction, best actress (Daniela Marín Navarro), and best actor (Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez), Costa Rican-French director Valentina Maurel has just shown her second feature film, “Forever Your Maternal Animal”, in the Un Certain Regard section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, which owed the three protagonists of the film (Marina De Tavira, Daniela Marín Navarro, Mariangel Villegas) a joint Un Certain Regard Prize for Best Actress. 

On the fact that “Forever Your Maternal Animal” somewhat expands on what she did in her debut, featuring a similar set of characters played by the same actors, Valentina Maurel explains: ‘Of course I always talk about family relationships, because for me it is the place where you know yourself the less… because you build yourself a life, you try to control something of your life, and then when you go back to the country you come from or to your family, there’s always something completely strange – you’re caught up in dynamics that are completely blurry...’ ‘This time,’ she adds, ‘I wanted [to pair that subject] with the fact that when you are a Latin-American person who lives in Europe, you also feel very estranged from your own country because you easily start believing that Europe is actually the centre of the world – even if you don’t want to, but this is the sensation you have, and that your own country is a very peripheral place in the world. That, and you also feel estranged in your own family.’

On the fact that the film is not linear and that the viewer, not quite knowing what it is going to be about, happily let’s him- or herself be immersed in the urban environment of San José (in the neighbourhood where the director was raised) and the somewhat haphazard criss-crossing trajectories of the members of this disconcerted family where each one is going through a bit of an existential crisis: ‘I like that kind of structure, because it feels like life – you just go through it and you don’t really know where it’s gonna take you. And then at some moments of your life, you can grasp [a hint of meaning], but then you forget about it and you go through life again...’ Maurel also points out that everything is determined by the characters: ‘I think characters are enough, sometimes, to make a film.’

On the title, borrowed on a whim from one of her own mother’s poems, Valentina Maurel confesses: ‘I felt like this title had a secret meaning for me, and now when I see the film, I realise the title has a secret relation with the film which is not obvious, but important.’ She adds: ‘I can never find titles for my films. I used to think it was a problem, but now I think it’s okay: you cannot explain my films through a title. It’s difficult to pitch, but I think I like that.’ ‘“Forever your maternal animal” means, she continues, that no matter what happens, I will be your mother, and that’s beautiful and comforting, but I think it also feels almost like a threat – a threat to the daughter, who doesn’t want to have her mother forever attached to her life, or maybe a threat to oneself as a mother: you don’t wanna be forever a mother… Motherhood has something that is imprisoning for the one who has to carry this responsibility but also for the one who has to be the object of this responsibility… So I wanted to talk about these things without [formulating] a definitive message.’

On the character of the little sister, Amalia, and her brand of rebellion: ‘[She’s] a character who wants to escape the certainties her sister has about what is good in life – in the same way you want to escape your mother’s certainties –, but also the success model of a certain intellectual middle class that thinks that if you want to succeed in life, you have to study, that you can believe in God or the illuminati but not both, because these things are contradictory, and I think this also represents also a way of thinking that Elsa has, because she studied in Europe and because she is very far from what is also a Latin American culture that negotiates with reality in more flexible way. [Latin America] is a very religious place – like Europe, indeed, but it’s a religion of a softer kind, which hasn’t been contaminated by secular things and allows itself more manifestations of spirituality, of the unreal … Amalia wants her freedom, and her freedom is to go in the opposite direction of where a bourgeois education wants her to go.’

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Sarah Arnold’s debut feature, “Too Many Beasts”, set in a countryside teeming with wild boars, angry hunters and local authorities catering for their own needs, is a biting, surprisingly funny and rather exhilarating thriller revolving around a local police investigation on a gruesome murder, presented at the Directors’ Fortnight of the 79th Cannes Film Festival. The film features finely tuned, witty dialogues recited by a top-shelf ensemble led by a priceless Alexis Manenti as the initially taciturn and heartbroken but sharply observant Corsican newcomer at the police station, and the unfailingly badass Ella Rumpf as a police psychologist with whom he has to have regular meetings and immediately reassures him, when he asks if he shouldn’t talk to a make therapist, by saying, ‘don’t worry, I’m just as incompetent as a man.’

“Too Many Beasts” was awarded the Europa Cinemas Label.

About the setup, the French director says she thought it was ‘a great way to talk about class conflict,’ and said she was trying to play with the codes of the kind of film men would make, especially American men – citing “Fargo”, “Inherent Vice” and “True Detective” as references –, and give them an absurd slant, seeing as she is a woman making a film in a specific area of a much smaller country.

Sarah Arnold tells us more about the character of Fulda, and explains why she wanted to meld the therapy element with the investigation. She also underlines the unpredictability of the situation and talks about the fact that many characters here are in fact quite ill-adapted within this society.

On subverting gender-related stereotypes within a traditionally male context, Sarah Arnold says she wanted to make it difficult, for the viewer, ‘to identify exactly who each of these people is, where the desire is,’ pointing out that if you blur things for the viewer, ‘if they don’t know what to expect, then you can be free.’

On the fact that her quirky characters – and the subverted gender stereotypes – represent a form of rebellion against the set order, Sarah Arnold mentions, ‘This is what we wanted to feel, while we were working on this project: that there is a possibility of staying free and that we have to stand, all together… I’m not an activist, but I have a lot of respect for these people, who dedicate their lives to fighting. I made this film so as not to forget that we have to disobey.‘

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Actress-turned-director and known feminist activist Judith Godrèche tells us more about her adaptation of fellow-activist Annie Ernaux‘ 2016 novel, presented in the Un Certain Regard section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival.

Judith Godrèche explains why she wanted the Nobel Prize-winning author to be included in the film, to be “a character too”. We discuss the shame her main character Annie, in 1958, feels about things she feels responsible for when she isn’t – “She’s carrying the weight of that and it impacts her body, and it impacts her future and her vision of her future“. We also discuss the role of Annie’s mother in her gradual path towards emancipation through studying – “She did not want Annie to clean the house, she did not want to teach Annie how to iron… Annie’s mum was a very important leader and wanted Annie to study so she wouldn’t get married, have kids. Even in her mum, there was a thirst for independence“.

The French director details her approach of the central trauma and of the intimate scenes, underlining that the banality of it, at the time, had to be represented too. She also recounts what led her to casting her own daughter Tess Barthélemy to play Annie, and points out that it felt very important to her that she would discover the job of actress in the best possible conditions.

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In competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, “The Dreamed Adventure” marks Valeska Grisebach’s return to Bulgaria after “Western”. Set in Svilengrad, a town on the Bulgarian border, the film follows Veska, an archaeologist, as her encounter with Said, an old acquaintance whose car has been stolen, pulls her into a hidden network of criminal ties beneath the town’s apparently quiet surface.

Grisebach explained that her earlier experience in Bulgaria left her with the sense that the country still held stories she needed to understand.

“I realised how limited my knowledge about Europe is,” she said. “Europe has so many different faces, and in Bulgaria Europe can feel very different than in Germany.”

For Grisebach, the film also arises from a personal reckoning with European history. Raised in West Berlin, she felt deeply connected to the generational experience of 1989, yet increasingly aware of how differently that turning point was lived across the continent.

“We are connected by that changing moment in Europe,” she said, “but also divided by the different experiences that followed.”

The director described The Dreamed Adventure as a collaborative project rather than an external gaze placed upon Bulgaria.

“I had doubts because I am a German director,” she admitted. “Who is telling whose story? But once I was in contact with people, those doubts began to disappear.”

The title “The Dreamed Adventure” carries, for Grisebach, a deliberate ambiguity. It connects the film to adventure cinema and to the Western genres traditionally coded as male and often built around strength, conquest and survival.

“Adventure was a link to genre,” she explained. “I was interested in having a woman look into that genre, then step into it.”

The “dreamed” aspect also refers to the 1990s, a decade the director sees as filled with promises, desires and unresolved contradictions.

“It was a time full of dreams,” she said, “but also an ambivalent time, because many dreams were not fulfilled.”

At the centre of the film is Veska, a woman who observes before acting. Her profession as an archaeologist becomes essential to the film’s method: she reads surfaces, studies traces and looks for meaning in details others overlook.

For Grisebach, this attentiveness was crucial: “The gaze was very important to me,” she said. “Who owns the gaze?”

The director linked this question to her own relationship with genre cinema. “I have internalised a male gaze, also through genre films,” she reflected. “For me, it was interesting, and sometimes difficult, to bring a woman in motion in a film.”

Rather than claiming to rewrite cinematic language, Grisebach described her approach as an interaction with existing traditions. “I wouldn’t say rewriting,” she concluded. “Filmmaking has so much to do with getting in contact with something.”

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