A cursory glance would conclude that politics is not on Cannes agenda this year.
The 79th edition of the influential film festival has no explicitly "political film" in the main competition (last year, the Palme d'Or went to It Was Just An Accident, an Iranian film about a group of political prisoners, and there were a couple of films about Gaza and Palestine in the sidebars).
So far, politics on screen at Cannes has shaped up around gender issues while the best-reviewed title, Fatherland, is a post-World War II drama about the writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika as they travelled through the rubble of West and East Germany.
However, the world in 2026 is so fraught that art can no longer pretend to exist above political anxieties. Headlines from the Venice Biennale, the world's biggest art show that opened earlier this month, are as much about art as about protests against Russia and Israel.
In February, the Berlin International Film Festival went through a series of painful polemics regarding Wim Wenders' clumsily phrased statement -- "film should stay out of politics" -- and Germany's stance in the Palestine-Israel conflict, climaxing on awards-night when one of the winners unfurled a Palestinian flag on stage, to the displeasure of the German bureaucracy.
Festival de Cannes, which runs until Saturday, has navigated the tricky real-world discourses by, well, not trying to navigate anything. The jury president, Park Chan-wook, said from the very first day that he believed art and politics were inseparable -- a proclamation that eased up the prevalent cynicism in politics and in cinema that typically characterises Cannes.
Then Javier Bardem, one of the most outspoken pro-Palestine actors who headlines a competition title, said at a Sunday press conference that the genocide in Palestine is "a fact".
Cate Blanchett held a masterclass and said she felt sad that film festivals have become the only place where one could talk about "wars, conflicts and genocides". The clip has gone viral.
On screen, the most political, topical film in Cannes this year is also the most personal. Rehearsals For A Revolution is a memoir film by Pegah Ahangarani, an exiled Iranian actress now living in Germany.
The film is a visual diary strung from personal home movies, photographs and archival footage, foregrounding the filmmaker's family and friends against Iran's turbulent political history from the 1979 revolution up to the present war with the US.
The autobiographical structure of Rehearsals For A Revolution is not a limitation but rather a strategy that contributes to an understanding of the complex social and ideological makeup of Iran over the past four decades.
Ahangarani starts with the story of her father when he was an idealistic young man who took part in the Islamic Revolution that brought down the monarchy in 1979, and who later became disillusioned by Ayatollah Khomenei's Islamic theocracy. The film moves lyrically to the story of Ahangarani's mother, a filmmaker who introduced her to cinema, then to her uncle, a student whose heart was shattered by the disappointment of the 1999 demonstrations.
In the powerful mid-section that plays like a thriller, we witness Ahangarani's shaky, hand-held visual account of the massive Green Movement protest on the streets of Tehran in 2010.
A film like this blurs the boundaries between biography, history and cinema -- and sometimes that sort of blur is necessary, especially at a film festival that thrives on the theatrics.
Rehearsals For A Revolution is a story of disillusionment, massacre, disappointment, exile, and yet, as the filmmaker insists, it's also a story of hope. Cut down on the red-carpet scroll: This is a film that makes Cannes political and relevant.
The Cannes Film Festival runs until Saturday.
