Cannes 2020: What Films Would Have Premiered at the Film Festival?

The 73rd edition of the Cannes Film Festival was supposed to be a big one: A jury led by Spike Lee would have spent two weeks in May picking a Palme d’Or winner to follow “Parasite,” the Bong Joon Ho thriller that debuted on the Croisette last year before it went on to win the best-picture Oscar.

Though a global pandemic scuttled the festival’s plans, Cannes has nevertheless offered a tantalizing look at what might have been.

On Wednesday, the organization’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, announced a lineup of 56 films meant to represent the official Cannes 2020 selection, including Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” starring Benicio Del Toro and Timothée Chalamet, the Kate Winslet-Saoirse Ronan romance “Ammonite,” and Pixar’s “Soul.” Stamped with the Cannes imprimatur, some of these movies will migrate to festivals like Telluride, Toronto, and Sundance — unless they, too, are delayed or canceled as the pandemic continues.

“We will all miss the Cannes effect: what a single projection at the Palais des Festivals gives birth to, an acclamation, a reputation, a storm and sometimes a thunderstorm,” Frémaux said in a statement. “Now that the world premiere at the Palais won’t happen, it will have to be in theaters and festivals around the world.”

Compared with a typical Cannes slate, the lineup is both fresher (15 of the films were by first-time directors, a record tally) and more female: 16 women filmmakers were invited, compared with just six in 2015, a reflection of the festival’s sometimes fitful progress toward gender parity.

In another break from the norm, the films were not divvied up into categories, so it’s unclear which would have been competing for the Palme d’Or and which would have played in the festival’s sidebar programs. Twenty-one of the selected films were French, considerably more than the Cannes average, suggesting that the festival’s home country helped fill gaps left when the releases of many major movies were postponed until 2021.

Frémaux noted that some of those premieres will instead be held at next year’s Cannes. “We’ll meet them again,” he said.

Here’s the complete Cannes 2020 lineup.

Returning Filmmakers

“The French Dispatch,” Wes Anderson (United States)

“Summer of 85,” François Ozon (France)

“True Mothers,” Naomi Kawase (Japan)

“Lovers Rock,” Steve McQueen (Britain)

“Mangrove,” Steve McQueen (Britain)

“Another Round,” Thomas Vinterberg (Denmark)

 “DNA,” Maïwenn (France/Algeria)

“Last Words,” Jonathan Nossiter (United States)

“Heaven: To the Land of Happiness,” Im Sang-soo (South Korea)

“Forgotten We’ll Be,” Fernando Trueba (Spain)

 “Peninsula,” Yeon Sang-ho (South Korea)

“In the Dusk,” Sharunas Bartas (Lithuania)

“Home Front,” Lucas Belvaux (Belgium)

“The Real Thing,” Koji Fukada (Japan)

Filmmakers Who Haven’t Been to Cannes Before

“Passion Simple,” Danielle Arbid (Lebanon)

“A Good Man,” Marie Castille Mention-Schaar (France)

“Les Choses Qu’on Dit, Les Choses Qu’on Fait,” Emmanuel Mouret (France)

“Squad,” Ayten Amin (Egypt)

“Limbo,” Ben Sharrock (Britain)

“Red Soil,” Farid Bentoumi (France)

“Sweat,” Magnus Von Horn (Sweden)

“Teddy,” Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma (France)

“February,” Kamen Kalev (Bulgaria)

“Ammonite,” Francis Lee (Britain)

“Un Médecin de Nuit,” Elie Wajeman (France)

“Enfant Terrible,” Oskar Roehler (Germany)

“Nadia, Butterfly,” Pascal Plante (Canada)

“Here We Are,” Nir Bergman (Israel)

First-Time Filmmakers

“Falling,” Viggo Mortensen (United States)

“Pleasure,” Ninja Thyberg (Sweden)

“Slalom,” Charlène Favier (France)

“Memory House,” Joao Paulo Miranda Maria (Brazil)

“Broken Keys,” Jimmy Keyrouz (Lebanon)

“Ibrahim,” Samir Guesmi (France)

“Beginning,” Dea Kulumbegashvili (Georgia)

“Gagarine,” Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh (France)

“16 Printemps,” Suzanne Lindon (France)

“Vaurien,” Peter Dourountzis (France)

“Garçon Chiffon,” Nicolas Maury (France)

“Should the Wind Fall,” Nora Martirosyan (Armenia)

“John and the Hole,” Pascual Sisto (United States)

“Striding Into the Wind,” Wei Shujun (China)

“The Death of Cinema and My Father Too,” Dani Rosenberg (Israel)

“L’Origine du Monde,” Laurent Lafitte (France)

“Josep,” Aurel (France)

The Rest

“Septet: The Story of Hong Kong,” Ann Hui, Johnnie To, Tsui Hark, Sammo Hung, Yuen Woo-Ping and Patrick Tam (Hong Kong)

“The Billion Road,” Dieudo Hamadi (Democratic Republic of Congo)

“The Truffle Hunters,” Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw (United States)

“9 Jours a Raqqa,” Xavier de Lauzanne (France)

“Antoinette dans les Cévennes,” Caroline Vignal (France)

“Les Deux Alfred,” Bruno Podalydès (France)

“The Big Hit,” Emmanuel Courcol (France)

“Le Discours,” Laurent Tirard (France)

“Aya and the Witch,” Goro Miyazaki (Japan)

“Flee,” Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Denmark)

“Soul,” Pete Docter (United States)