Inside the opening night of the 79th Festival de Cannes — Eye Haïdara’s commanding debut, Peter Jackson’s long-awaited Palme, and a closing declaration that crossed two continents.
At seven o’clock on Tuesday evening, May 12, the Palais des Festivals glowed in the late Riviera light. On its façade, the festival’s official poster — Thelma and Louise, rifles raised, hair caught in the wind — set the mood of an edition that wants, this year, to speak louder than usual. Inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the seats filled in near silence. Demi Moore, Chloé Zhao, Stellan Skarsgård, Diego Luna, Heidi Klum, and jury president Park Chan-wook took their places. The lights dimmed. The 79th edition was about to begin.
Eye Haïdara, in command
She entered alone, accompanied only by the violin of Grammy-winning musician Miri Ben-Ari, whose score had been written for the occasion. Eye Haïdara — the French-Malian actress known for Le Sens de la fête and the Netflix series Furies — opened with a line from Godard: one does not make films to play it safe. The room understood, instantly, that this would not be a routine ceremony.
What followed was rare in its register: a speech that moved between humor and gravity without ever forcing the seam. She paid tribute to filmmakers who turn their cameras toward the uncomfortable, to those who insist on the dignity of ordinary lives, and — perhaps her finest line of the night — to those who choose to make us laugh, a form of courage we tend to underestimate. She slipped in cult-film impressions, a quiet word for her parents, and the conviction at the heart of her remarks: that Cannes remains a place where the world still gathers.
A pause for Nathalie Baye
The rhythm broke. On the screen behind her, the face of Nathalie Baye appeared. Haïdara saluted the actress who, she said, marked the history of French cinema. The audience rose. The applause held for a long moment — the kind of silence-within-applause that no producer can stage.
Peter Jackson, at last
Then came the gesture the festival had teased for weeks. Elijah Wood — Frodo himself — walked onstage to honor the director who, twenty-five years earlier, had cast him in The Lord of the Rings. He described a filmmaker who could hold tenderness and horror in the same frame, born in a New Zealand that had no film industry to speak of. Then he handed Peter Jackson his Palme d’Or d’honneur — the first Cannes recognition of a career that had never once been selected in competition.
Jackson, visibly moved, joked that he had never seen himself as a Palme kind of director. A breath later: he had never expected, he confessed, to win one. He thanked the festival for what he called an unexpected and almost miraculous honor.
The Beatles, the East, and the West
The ceremony then turned to music. Theodora and Oklou — two of the most distinctive voices in French pop right now — delivered a rock-edged cover of Get Back, produced by SebastiAn, in tribute to Jackson’s 2021 documentary series on the Beatles. From his seat beside Haïdara, the director smiled like a fan.
The closing image arrived in the form of two women walking toward each other across the stage: Gong Li from one side, Jane Fonda from the other. Gong Li spoke first — of the East and the West meeting under the same lights, of cinema as the language of what we share. Fonda, at 88, took the line of the night. She believes, she said, in the power of voices: on the screen, off the screen, and in the street. Cinema, she added, is an act of resistance.
Then, in Mandarin and in French, together, they declared the 79th Festival de Cannes officially open.
The room rose again. The jury joined them onstage. The curtain closed on Pierre Salvadori’s La Vénus électrique, the out-of-competition romantic comedy chosen to set the festival’s tone — light, generous, alive.
Eye Haïdara had the last word, delivered with a half-smile as the credits prepared to roll: be reckless, and have a good festival. For the next eleven days, twenty-two films will compete for the Palme d’Or. The Riviera night had only just begun.
The 79th Festival de Cannes runs through May 23, 2026. The competition jury is presided over by Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook.
