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 Cannes 2020 lineup announced so far. Updates will follow when the complete list is released.

“The French Dispatch,” Wes Anderson

“Summer of 85,” François Ozon

“True Mothers,” Naomi Kawase

“Lover’s Rock,” Steve McQueen

“Mangrove,” Steve McQueen

“Another Round,” Thomas Vinterberg

“Heaven,” Hong Sang-soo

“Peninsula,” Yeon Sang-ho

“ADN,” Maïwenn

“Soul,” Pete Docter

“Ammonite,” Francis Lee

“Falling,” Viggo Mortensen

“Broken Keys,” Jimmy Keyrouz

“Truffle Hunters,” Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck

“Aya and the Witch,” Goro Miyazaki

“Last Words,” Jonathan Nossiter

“Limbo,” Ben Sharrock