Cannes 2026 (Competition): A Few Things Happening By A River (dir. Daniel Soares) | Review
An exquisite contemporary fable about our growing impermeability to the natural world, A Few Things Happening by a River portrays a humanity no longer capable of revitalizing itself, trapped within lifestyles and mental constructs that keep emotionally absent from the sensory world around it.
With A Few Things Happening by a River, German-born Portuguese filmmaker Daniel Soares returns to the Cannes Film Festival short film competition two years after receiving a Special Mention from the jury for Bad for a Moment. Once again competing for the Short Film Palme d’Or, Soares delivers a contemporary fable that confirms the singularity of his cinematic voice.
Shot on film and bathed in exquisitely textured natural light, the short unfolds as a true cinema of sensation. Every frame seems composed to reveal something deeply organic: the presence of wind, water, foliage — constantly reinforced by immersive sound design that keeps nature hauntingly close. Everything in the image evokes a natural paradise. And yet, this paradise remains strangely inoperative.
An Inability to Replenish Ourselves
The river becomes a lifeline turned escape route. A continuous current around which different groups gravitate in search of rest, pleasure, or some form of reconnection. Yet none of them truly manage to revitalize themselves. They come seeking renewal, yet remain impermeable to the source itself.
With near-clinical precision, the film observes this contemporary inability to surrender. A group of teenagers uses the river as a spectacular backdrop for a viral video, floating motionless like corpses drifting downstream. Their attention is not devoted to the beauty surrounding them, but to the credibility of the image they are producing: concealing any visible sign of breathing becomes more important than their own safety.
Elsewhere, food delivery riders jump into the water without even removing their motorcycle helmets, trapped within a fragmented temporality where every second must remain productive — until the delivery app’s notification violently summons them back to work. A metal detector enthusiast transforms the tranquility of the landscape into the possibility of profit. A vacationer proves incapable of enjoying a perfectly sunny afternoon, already consumed by anxiety over the coming days’ bad weather. Finally, a father attempting to spend phone-free holidays with his daughters sees the fragile sanctuary collapse when his boss calls with an “urgent” request he cannot refuse.
Disembodied Imperatives Governing the Bodies
Most of these pressures remain off-screen: a notification, an online trend, a weather forecast, a professional demand. Disembodied imperatives governing human bodies. Yet their impact is profoundly physical. Soares films people who are physically immersed in nature yet mentally elsewhere — bodies colonized by distant anxieties and internalized systems of conditioning that confiscate their attention from the sensory world.
This is precisely where the film becomes both devastating and deeply moving. Because the river overflows with abundance. It attracts, calls out, envelops. But this abundance no longer finds a receptive vessel. Contemporary humanity seems to have lost its capacity to be nourished by the world around it. Nature remains intact, magnificent, fully available — yet our relationship to it has become dysfunctional.
A Few Things Happening by a River ultimately constructs a genuine poetics of sensory frustration: the portrait of a humanity seeking revitalization in nature while remaining incapable of suspending the mental and social mechanisms preventing that reconnection. A humanity endlessly orbiting the source without ever truly drinking from it.
Infused with a deliciously burlesque tone reminiscent of Ruben Östlund’s Incident by a Bank (2010), Daniel Soares’ short masterfully combines vibrant, visually meaningful aesthetics with a ruthless meditation on our disconnection from both the living world and ourselves. The result is a remarkable achievement — one that deserves to be seen, and perhaps even Palme d’Or-worthy.
A Few Things Happening by a River (original title: Algumas coisas que acontecem ao lado de um rio) is a Portuguese-French co-production between O Som e a Fúria (Portugal), L’Oeil Vif Productions (France) and Kid With a Bike (Portugal).
Our team is on site for the 79th Cannes Film Festival, from May 12 to 23, 2026.
