With Park Chan-wook leading the jury and a powerful slate of Korean films in competition, Cannes 2026 is quietly shadowed by the question of whether the Palme d’Or is already leaning toward Seoul.
In the history of the Cannes Film Festival, no Korean filmmaker has ever chaired the main competition jury. That changed on May 12, 2026, when Park Chan-wook, the visionary director of Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and Decision to Leave, walked into the Palais des Festivals as jury president of the 79th edition. It was, as Park himself acknowledged, a sign of how far Korean cinema has come. And yet almost immediately, the question arose: with a Korean director holding the gavel and a Korean film generating the loudest buzz in the competition, is the Palme d’Or already written?
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Korea’s presence at Cannes 2026 spans three sections of the festival, covering the full range from main competition to parallel showcase. After a year of complete absence from the official lineup, a gap that rattled confidence in the Korean industry, the country has returned with something to prove.
Hope (Main Competition — Palme d’Or contender)
The film commanding the most attention is Na Hong-jin’s Hope, his first feature in a decade and the first Korean film in the main competition since Park Chan-wook’s own Decision to Leave in 2022. The 160-minute science fiction epic, produced on what is reportedly the largest budget in Korean film history, follows Bum-seok, a police chief in the remote coastal settlement of Hope Harbor near the Demilitarised Zone, whose investigation into an alleged tiger sighting spirals into something far more terrifying. Aliens from a planet called Gh’ertu have crash-landed — and they bring with them their own class hierarchies, their own ferocity, and an instinct to protect their young that mirrors, unsettlingly, the humans they threaten.
Korean stars Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, and Jung Ho-yeon anchor the film, alongside Hollywood names Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell, all playing CGI alien characters. Its world premiere at the Grand Lumière on May 17 earned a seven-minute standing ovation. Critics scrambled for superlatives. One trade journalist called it “an alien entity in the history of the Cannes Competition, delivering a shockwave far greater than expected.” (source). Another described it as feeling like “RRR on crack cocaine laced with sci-fi and torched with jet fuel,” (source) meant, apparently, as high praise. Na has confirmed that a sequel script is already written.
Colony (Midnight Screenings)
The director of Train to Busan, Yeon Sang-ho, returns to Cannes with Colony, a claustrophobic survival thriller selected for Midnight Screenings — the festival’s home for polished, high-energy genre cinema. Set inside a high-rise building sealed off by a rapidly spreading viral outbreak, the film follows a group of survivors as they attempt to escape while those infected around them mutate into evolving, increasingly unpredictable threats. It is Yeon’s fourth appearance at Cannes, extending a relationship with the festival that began with The King of Pigs in 2011.
Dora (Directors’ Fortnight)
The quietest and perhaps most intriguing of the three Korean entries is Dora, the third feature by writer-director July Jung, selected for the parallel Directors’ Fortnight section. A Korea–France–Luxembourg co-production, the film draws on Freud’s 1900 case study of a hysteria patient known as “Dora” and transposes it to a Korean coastal village during a summer holiday. A young woman, struggling with both physical and mental illness, begins to recover after falling in love — until the formation of relationships brings its own turbulence. Directors’ Fortnight artistic director Julien Rejl described the film as departing entirely from the conventions of Korean filmmaking.
The film stars former K-pop idol Kim Do-yeon alongside Japanese actress Sakura Ando, best known for her Oscar-circuit success in Shoplifters, making her debut in a Korean film. Jung has appeared at every major Cannes section except the main competition — a trajectory many observers expected to culminate this year. That it did not makes Dora‘s selection a statement of its own kind.
Park Chan-wook’s appointment as jury president is historic in the plainest sense of the word. He is the first Korean filmmaker ever to hold the role, succeeding Juliette Binoche and Greta Gerwig in a line of jury chiefs that has, until now, never included an Asian director of his background. His jury includes director Chloé Zhao, actress Demi Moore, actor Stellan Skarsgård, actress Ruth Negga, and filmmaker Laura Wandel, among others.
At his opening press conference on May 12, Park described his approach with characteristic precision: “I want to watch the films with a sense of excitement, without prejudice, preconceptions, or fixed ideas, waiting to see which work will surprise me. But when it comes time to discuss them, I will speak as a professional with clear views and an understanding of cinema history.”
“Korea is no longer a peripheral country in film,” he said, citing his appointment as evidence of that shift. He welcomed the presence of three Korean films in the lineup as works he expected to be “very good.”
The question hanging over the final week of the festival is an unavoidable one. Park Chan-wook has a long and specific relationship with Cannes. He won the Grand Prix for Oldboy in 2004, the Jury Prize for Thirst in 2009, and Best Director for Decision to Leave in 2022. Na Hong-jin is, by reputation and by the evidence of Hope‘s premiere, one of the most striking filmmakers of his generation. Both men are Korean. Both are associated with visceral, genre-rooted, formally ambitious cinema.
However, the history of Cannes juries is not a history of sentiment. The Palme d’Or is debated and voted upon by the full jury, not decreed by its president. Park’s personal admiration for a Korean film, however sincere, would need to carry eight other jurors across the finish line. And Hope, for all its stunning reception, has not been universally embraced by critics — some have found its second half uneven, even as they acknowledged the scale and ambition of what Na has attempted.
What Park’s presidency almost certainly does do, however, is ensure that Hope receives a genuinely serious hearing. This is a jury led by a filmmaker who understands genre cinema from the inside, who has spent his career pushing Korean stories into international consciousness, and who has done so at this very festival. Whatever the outcome on May 23, it is difficult to imagine a more fitting steward for a competition in which Korean cinema is once again asking to be taken at the very highest level.
Park Chan-wook won his first Cannes prize twenty-two years ago with a film about a man imprisoned without knowing why. This year, the irony runs in the opposite direction. Everyone can see exactly how this story might end.
Our team is on site for the 79th Cannes Film Festival, from May 12 to 23, 2026.
