Cannes and the language of exile

There was a time when Cannes’ strangest species was the ‘Euro pudding’: prestige films assembled from several funding bodies, multiple languages and a cast drawn from every corner of the continent, all set in a recognisable but oddly deracinated Europe. They were designed to travel internationally and often ended up travelling nowhere at all. There were notable exceptions. Luchino Visconti and David Lean’s extravaganzas come to mind. This year, large European co-productions returned to Cannes in force. Yet they produced some of the festival’s strongest films: works obsessed with displacement, exile and cultural friction.

Europe’s most urgent cinema now emerges precisely from directors who no longer entirely belong to the countries they depict. You could almost map the festival by the distance between a director’s passport and the language spoken on screen. Cristian Mungiu, the great anatomist of post-communist Romania, arrived with Fjord, set in Norway and filmed largely in Norwegian and English with a smattering of Romanian. Andrey Zvyagintsev, living in exile since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, returned imaginatively to provincial Russia in Minotaur, a savage portrait of wartime corruption and moral decay. Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi followed Drive My Car with his French-language debut Soudain, filmed substantially in Paris. And Polish-born British filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski, whose work has long focused on questions of memory and dislocation, arrived with Fatherland, a German-language film about Thomas Mann returning to a divided Germany after exile in America.

These were by no means rootless co-productions designed by sales agents. Their characters move uneasily between languages, loyalties and moral systems. Europe appears not as a harmonious cosmopolitan project but as a continent in which identity has become perilously unstable.

Fjord begins with a Romanian-Norwegian family recently settled in an isolated fjord community and soon falling under collective suspicion after bruises are discovered on their daughter’s body. In Mungiu’s vision, the family have constructed a delicate synthesis of immigrant religiosity and Scandinavian prosperity, only to discover that the liberal state, neighbours and institutions around them interpret the same gestures according to radically different moral assumptions.

Mungiu has exchanged the villages of Romania for the cold brightness of a Norwegian inlet, but his real subject remains collective suspicion and the speed with which ethics harden into bureaucratic force. What begins as a debate about parenting becomes something larger and more uncomfortable — a portrait of multicultural Europe as a landscape of mutual incomprehension.

Minotaur is harsher and more overtly political. Zvyagintsev’s protagonist, a wealthy provincial businessman living behind the walls of a woodland estate, is instructed to provide men for the Russian war effort. Rather than sacrifice his workers, he recruits new lorry drivers with promises of inflated salaries, knowing they will be sent to the front before collecting their first wages. Meanwhile, he finds out that his wife has a lover, a problem he addresses with the same ruthless efficiency.

Zvyagintsev understands modern Russia as an immoral ecosystem in which corruption reproduces itself at every level, at the family dinner table and on the battlefield alike. A husband humiliating his wife and casually erasing workers from a payroll becomes inseparable from a state treating human beings as disposable inventory. 

The same instability of inheritance and belonging surfaced elsewhere, particularly in the prominence of films about male desire with Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love, Lukas Dhont’s Coward and Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La bola negra.

Sprawling across 1932, 1937 and 2017, La bola negra connects contemporary Spain to buried histories of homosexual repression and secrecy. Its recurring suggestion, that the Spanish landscape itself is full of concealed lives and interrupted lineages, echoed the wider mood of the festival. These films were  interested in the afterlife of silence: the way societies continue to shape the terms of intimate life long after legal equality has been achieved.

No film brought those anxieties together more elegantly than Fatherland. Pawlikowski’s film follows Thomas Mann during his 1949 return to Germany after years of Californian exile. Accompanied by his daughter Erika, Mann travels between Frankfurt and Weimar attempting an impossible balancing act between East and West Germany.

Hanns Zischler plays Mann with austere reserve, moving through postwar Germany like a man trying to inhabit a country that no longer fully exists. Germany greets him as a moral monument while simultaneously reproaching him for having fled. Mann’s curt response, that staying would simply have destroyed him, carries a sense of profound exhaustion.

What makes Fatherland so powerful is that Pawlikowski understands exile as something more than geography. Mann has survived Nazism physically and artistically, yet survival itself is a morally ambiguous condition. The Germany that formed him — the world of Goethe, humanism and cultural continuity — seems irrecoverable, contaminated by fascism, division and the emerging Cold War.

Fatherland ultimately suggests that Europe’s defining cultural figure may no longer be the rooted national artist but the exile, the returnee, the divided intellectual speaking in several historical languages at once. That was true of Thomas Mann in 1949 and, Cannes 2026 implied, it may be true again now.

The old ‘Euro pudding’ imagined that crossing borders meant smoothing differences away into exportable prestige. The strongest films at this year’s festival proposed the opposite: that displacement sharpens identity, and that Europe is currently understood most clearly by filmmakers who live far away from the countries of their birth.