Ukraine to be honored at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival

The Cannes Film Festival will show its support for Ukraine with a special program of three documentaries on Tuesday, the day of the opening ceremony, organizers announced Friday. "This 'Ukraine Day' serves as a reminder of the commitment of artists, writers, and journalists to recounting this conflict at the heart of Europe, which has been affecting the Ukrainian people and the world for three years now," they said in a statement.

This "Ukraine Day", with France Télévisions, Brut and the Cannes town hall, plans to program three films dedicated to the war at the Palais des Festivals, including a portrait of President Volodymyr Zelensky , a report on the front, filmed between February and April 2025, by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and an immersion in an army platoon by a Ukrainian documentary filmmaker.

"This program serves as a reminder of the commitment of the Cannes Film Festival and its ability to tell the world's challenges, which are those of our future, through cinema. By joining forces, France Télévisions, Brut and the Cannes Film Festival affirm their desire to carry the voices of those who bear witness to contemporary realities and are committed to the truth," they continue.

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The Cannes Film Festival has demonstrated its support for Ukraine since the Russian invasion of 2022. In May of that year, President Zelensky made a surprise video address from Kyiv at the opening ceremony, summoning the spirit of Charlie Chaplin in the face of war. The Festival announced that, as long as the war lasted, it would refuse to welcome "Russian officials, government bodies, or journalists representing the official Russian line."

This year, Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa is in competition for Two Prosecutors , a film about the Stalinist purges that promises to resonate with current events, and exiled Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov is selected in the Cannes Première section for The Disappearance of Josef Mengele .