This year’s Cannes Film Festival has returned repeatedly to war and its aftermath. An unusually large number of entries — across genres and national cinemas — grapple with life during conflict, the moral compromises people make, and the psychic damage that lingers long after the fighting stops.
Several films look to Europe’s twentieth-century cataclysms. Lukas Dhont’s World War I drama Coward examines young men in the trenches, interrogating ideas of heroism and masculinity. Veteran German director Volker Schlöndorff continues his long engagement with the Second World War in Visitation, tracing three families living by a lake near Berlin through the rise of Nazism and the division of Germany up to the fall of the Wall. Two French films, Moulin and De Gaulle: Tilting Iron, revisit the resistance to Nazi occupation, while A Man of His Time takes a rarer view of collaboration in wartime France.
These historical stories often read like commentary on the present. With the rise of far‑right movements across Europe, filmmakers appear to be mining the past for warnings and explanations: how democracies slide into authoritarianism, how ordinary people either resist or adapt, and how cultural life is used to paper over complicity. Across these films runs a concern with trauma — the moral and psychological wounds inflicted on those who kill, and on those who look away.
Emmanuel Marre’s A Man of His Time is one of the festival’s most striking and unconventional wartime films. Ostensibly a period piece, it plays like a gritty indie populated by twenty‑somethings in vintage clothes who often speak and behave with a startlingly contemporary cadence. The protagonist, played by Swann Arlaud, is an aspiring writer and an ambitious social climber who seeks advancement within the Nazi bureaucracy; Marre says the character was inspired by his own great‑grandfather’s choice to work for the Vichy regime. The film deliberately jars by layering anachronistic touches — from 1980s pop tracks to modern slang — over 1940s settings to underline the ordinariness and the small cruelties that feed authoritarian systems.
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland moves the focus to the postwar era. The German‑language drama follows Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika Mann on a road trip through the divided Germany of the Cold War. The film stages a dispute between generations and moral outlooks: Thomas seeks to salvage German cultural achievements and preserve a literary legacy, while Erika insists that aesthetic arguments cannot erase the monstrous reality produced by Nazism. The film becomes a meditation on memory, responsibility, and the limits of artistic defense in the face of mass atrocity.
At Cannes this year there are also films that confront contemporary conflicts directly. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is a political thriller set against Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine. Loosely inspired by Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife, it follows a corrupt businessman whose obligations to supply men for military conscription make him complicit in sending people to die. A personal betrayal prompts a chilling act of violence, but the murder is quickly covered up by local authorities — an indictment of power, impunity, and the social structures that enable state violence. Shot outside Russia (Zvyagintsev filmed in Latvia) and made after the director’s near‑fatal battle with Covid‑19, Minotaur is his most overtly political film; for many viewers it stood out as one of the festival’s most powerful and urgent works and an early favorite for the Palme d’Or.
Taken together, these films show why historical and political cinema remains a vital tool for thinking about the present. Whether set in the trenches of World War I, the collaborationist offices of Vichy France, the divided landscape of Cold War Germany, or the contemporary battlefield framing of Russia and Ukraine, the movies at Cannes this year repeatedly ask how people behave under pressure, who pays the cost, and how nations remember or forget their darkest choices.
Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier