Cannes schedule reveals marathon lineup
- Festival de Cannes’ 2026 programme went live before the May 12 opening, confirming a Competition slate packed with unusually long films across the 12-day run. - Fourteen of the 22 Palme d’Or titles run at least two hours, with Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 196-minute “All of a Sudden” and Na Hong-jin’s 160-minute “Hope” among the biggest. - That matters because Cannes now looks even more tilted toward big-form auteur cinema — and harder for press, buyers, and programmers to navigate.
Cannes is a film festival, but it is also a scheduling machine. That machine just got a lot harder to run. With the 2026 programme now live ahead of the May 12 opening, the shape of this year’s Competition has snapped into focus — and the big story is runtime. A huge chunk of the Palme d’Or lineup is simply very long. ### What actually changed this week? The festival’s public programme page is now up, with booking access starting May 8 and the 79th edition running May 12 through May 23. That matters because the programme page is when the abstract lineup turns into a real daily calendar — who premieres when, how many films stack on top of each other, and how much breathing room anyone has between screenings. This year? Very long, basically. Fourteen of the 22 Competition films run two hours or more. That is not one or two prestige outliers. It is the dominant shape of the slate. The longest title listed so far is Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden” at 196 minutes. Na Hong-jin’s “Hope” lands at 160 minutes. Valeska Grisebach’s “The Dreamed Adventure” is 167 minutes, and several others cluster in the 130-to-155-minute range. ### Why is “Hope” getting singled out? Because it is both long and high-profile. “Hope” is Na Hong-jin’s first Cannes Competition entry after “The Wailing” played out of competition a decade ago, and its 2-hour-40-minute runtime makes it an easy symbol for the whole trend. It also looks like one of the event films of the festival — a South Korean science-fiction thriller with an international Fassbender. ### Is this just one bloated movie? No — that is the point. Pedro Almodóvar, Asghar Farhadi, Cristian Mungiu, László Nemes, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, and Andrey Zvyagintsev all show up in a Competition list that skews heavily toward established auteurs. Cannes always likes director-driven cinema, but this year the lengths make that preference unusually visible. The lineup reads less like a mixed portfolio and more like a bet on maximalist, festival-first filmmaking. ### Why does runtime matter so much at
