In our last article, we wrote about Isabelle Huppert and Virginie Efira both starring in multilingual films showing at MIFF. In a French-language film showing at MIFF 2026, the two share the screen alongside Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, while Catherine Deneuve in a cameo, in the Cannes praised psychological drama from Asghar Farhadi, about a creatively blocked author whose voyeurism causes art and life to bleed into one another.
Among the French language films at MIFF 2026, there are two striking portraits of adolescence: a documentary chronicling a boy’s teenage years in northern France over 10 years as he negotiates not only the burdens of familial expectation but also the limitations of his rural environment; and the Cannes Critics’ Week’s closing-night film directed by Félix de Givry (the breakout star in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden) about two lonely teenagers that find an unlikely connection. One of them is played by 14-year-old Otto (Milo Machado-Graner, the astonishing young star of Anatomy of a Fall, MIFF 2023).
There’s the body horror about a stressed-out young doctor suspects hostile jobs are doing something gnarly to her generation: work doesn’t just suck – it mutates. And when it comes to viruses, an animated feature which takes us on a gleefully filthy romp through Gay Paree as a buff influencer and his twink boyfriend attempt to cure a heinous virus that makes queer people straight.
Another French-language animated film at MIFF 2026 is the painterly, profound adaptation of Georges Bizet’s iconic opera, told from the perspective of children, which wowed Cannes audiences with its incredible use of colour.
By contrast, Cannes audiences yelled at the screen during Niels Schneider’s performance as the abusive husband in a deft psychological thriller about the insidiousness of domestic abuse. It is a vital and unsettling portrayal of coercive control disguised as love.
Then there’s the story of a pioneering female palaeontologist whose discoveries, made when she was just 12 years old, changed our understanding of prehistory. Inspired by the true story of the ground-breaking English fossil collector, the film brings her remarkable life to the screen
There are films from the 60s: Suspicion, murder and psychosexual paranoia abound in this twisted 1969 thriller from French New Wave titan Claude Chabrol, led by a coolly enigmatic performance from Stéphane Audran, and the 1996 Prix Jean Vigo winning film from legendary fashion photographer and photojournalist William Klein, who exploded into narrative filmmaking with this mockumentary, now a cult record of groovy 1960s mod fashion.
And speaking of photographers who turned to filmmaking, there’s the César Best Documentary–winning French box-office smash from Vincent Munier, who has won the National History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition three times. It’s got a César winning score featuring Warren Ellis, and offers a stunning visual and aural immersion into the misty Vosges mountains, on a journey through the forest in search of the endangered western capercaillie.
Read on to discover the French language films at MIFF 2026.
DIRECTOR: Maxence Voiseux
COUNTRIES : France, Germany, Switzerland
LANGUAGE: French
Gracefully condensing a decade’s worth of footage, this tender nonfiction gem out of Cannes chronicles the adolescence of a boy in northern France.
Young Gabin Jourdel lives in Artois, an agricultural region in economic decline. His mother, Patricia, is a cattle farmer; his father, Dominique, a butcher. Dominique intends for Gabin to one day take over his business, but even at the age of eight, the boy has reservations; demonstrably less at ease with his peers than with the Brown Swiss cows tended to by his mother, he would prefer to work with “living animals”. Over 10 years, as he grows up in front of director Maxence Voiseux’s camera, Gabin negotiates not only the burdens of familial expectation but also the limitations of his rural environment.
Voiseux achieves a seamless, effortlessly intimate vérité style that suggests immense trust on the part of the Jourdel family, who first appeared in the director’s 2016 mid-length film The Heirs (this earlier documentary focusing on Dominique, his two brothers and their own cattle dealer father). Recalling both Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (MIFF 2014) and the beloved Up series (MIFF 1986), Gabin, with its quietly grand scope, is a poignant, truly impressive feature-length debut.
Goodbye, Cruel World/ Adieu monde cruel
DIRECTOR: Félix de Givry
COUNTRY: France
LANGUAGE: French
In Cannes Critics’ Week’s tender, strikingly shot closing-night film, two lonely teenagers find an unlikely connection.
In a village tucked in the mountains of Normandy, 14-year-old Otto (Milo Machado-Graner, the astonishing young star of Anatomy of a Fall, MIFF 2023) just wants to disappear. Relentlessly persecuted by his classmates, he writes a farewell letter, sends it out to all and sundry, and heads to a bridge to end it all – but botches it. As everyone thinks he’s dead anyway, he decides to hide out on the outskirts of town. There, he’s discovered by fellow student Léna, who offers him shelter and an affection that fills his void.
The feature directorial debut of Félix de Givry – the breakout star of Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden – taps into contemporary concerns around bullying and mental health, but focuses more poetically on the adolescent search for belonging and purpose. Machado-Graner delivers a lodestone performance as Otto, portraying his disaffection mostly through wordless gesture, while the 16mm cinematography by Tara-Jay Bangalter – son of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter – amplifies emotion through striking depictions of light. Evoking the films of François Truffaut and Robert Bresson and capped off with fable-like narration by screen legend Françoise Lebrun (The Mother and the Whore, MIFF 2014), Goodbye, Cruel World is a tale about escaping pain and finding solace in the kindness of others.
DIRECTORS: Nicolas Athane, Marco Nguyen
COUNTRIES: France, Belgium
LANGUAGE: French
Come for a gleefully filthy romp through Gay Paree as a buff influencer and his twink fight to cure a heinous virus that makes queer people straight!
Jim Parfait is the top gay gymfluencer in Paris. When he’s not posting his daily workouts, he’s flaunting his gigantic rig at parties with his best pal Nina. She’s the first to spot that one of Jim’s 24 magnificent abs has vanished. Quelle horreur! Jim has heterosis: the dreaded virus that’s turning queer Parisians … straight. As Jim’s fickle followers abandon him for his brawny nemesis Pavel, he teams up with Lucien – closeted twink son of France’s villainous conservative health minister – on a hero’s cruise for a cure. In the city’s degenerate demimonde, they’ll encounter bears, techno-blasting leather puppies, Glamydia of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and the militant ‘Gaystapo’ threatening Jim with reverse-conversion therapy.
There’s serious commentary on the state of the modern world to be found in Nicolas Athane and Marco Nguyen’s outrageous Cannes-premiering satire. But be prepared nonetheless for a barrage of the world’s silliest, lewdest jokes, while the macaron-toned Rick and Morty-esque animation stuffs the frame with as much absurdity as the protein that Jim gorges on.
DIRECTOR: Marcel Barelli
COUNTRIES: Belgium, Switzerland
LANGUAGE: French
The story of a pioneering female palaeontologist, whose discoveries – at just 12 years of age – changed our understanding of prehistory.
Pre-teen Mary Anning loves nothing more than scouring the local seaside cliffs on fossil-finding expeditions with her father, who encourages her passion. It’s an activity typically frowned upon for a girl in 1811 – and, when her father dies suddenly, it seems like the grieving Mary’s dinosaur-hunting career is over before it started. But he leaves behind a mysterious drawing that might offer the one chance she has to change her fortunes … and, in so doing, change the world.
Inspired by the true story of the ground-breaking English fossil collector of the same name, Locarno Kids Award winner Marcel Barelli’s debut feature is built on a bedrock of enchanting handcrafted 2D animation. Exploring a key moment in Anning’s much-mythologised but little-known childhood – the discovery of the world’s first complete identified ichthyosaur skeleton – and accompanied by a deliberately anachronistic soundtrack of lo-fi punk rock, Mary Anning is a big-hearted tale of friendship and adventure for the young and not-so-young alike.
DIRECTOR: Asghar Farhadi
COUNTRY: France
LANGUAGE: French
In the latest Cannes-bowing psychological drama from Asghar Farhadi, Isabelle Huppert leads an all-star ensemble cast, playing a creatively blocked author whose voyeurism causes art and life to bleed into one another.
Sylvie, a reclusive and irascible novelist living in squalor in Paris, struggles to get the creative juices flowing. To address this, she decides to train her telescope on the apartment across the street, where she spies two men and a woman fumbling around with sound recording equipment. Fascinated, she conjures up a melodramatic backstory for the threesome and starts typing. But when a stranger enters her orbit, the lines between fantasy, fabrication and fixation begin to blur.
Asghar Farhadi’s follow-up to the Cannes Grand Prix–awarded A Hero (MIFF 2021) and Oscar winners The Salesman (MIFF 2016) and A Separation (MIFF 2011) is a suspenseful meta-thriller loosely based on the episode of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue (MIFF 1990) that became A Short Film About Love. Co-written by Farhadi and his brother Saeed, the film evokes Hitchcock and Coppola but deploys its own psychologically complex provocation on truth, intention and interpersonal obsession. Elevated by Guillaume Deffontaines’s sumptuous cinematography and Zbigniew Preisner’s haunting score, the performances from Vincent Cassel (The Shrouds, MIFF 2024), Virginie Efira (A Private Life, MIFF 2025), Pierre Niney (The Count of Monte Cristo) and Adam Bessa (Ghost Trail, MIFF 2024) – along with screen legend Catherine Deneuve in cameo – are superb, while lead Isabelle Huppert shines as an ill-tempered artist desperate to cling on to fading relevance.
DIRECTOR: Marion Le Corroller
COUNTRY: France
LANGUAGE: French
A stressed-out young doctor suspects hostile jobs are doing something gnarly to her generation. Turns out work doesn’t just suck – it mutates.
Margot (Mara Taquin, Zero Fucks Given) has worked hard to land her first job as a doctor in France’s most prestigious emergency department. But even in this life-and-death medical field, Charles Boyau Hospital is a brutal pressure cooker: the relentless competition among colleagues and merciless production-line pace set by her boss Hélène (Karin Viard, Polisse, MIFF 2011) have Margot so stressed that she’s literally sweating blood. She recalls treating similar unexplained symptoms in patients her own age: young professionals in French workplaces are brutally lashing out, seeming somehow to be … changing. Is this extreme burnout, a novel virus or a transformative environmental adaptation?
Premiering in the Cannes Midnight Screenings section, Marion Le Corroller’s brash debut feature shares a blood type with her body-horreur compatriots Coralie Fargeat (The Substance, MIFF 2024) and Julia Ducournau (Titane, MIFF 2021). But Species delivers its critique of ‘rise-and-grind’ productivity culture with an axe, not a scalpel: every frame is a gonzo frenzy, captured expressionistically by cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman at tilted angles and through fish-eye lenses, all set to a pulsating electronic score by ROB. Imagine Philip Brophy’s Body Melt (MIFF 1994) infecting The Pitt and you might at least have the right genus … but Species is a breed all its own.
DIRECTOR: Géraldine Nakache
COUNTRIES: France, Belgium
LANGUAGE: French
Grounded by authentic performances, Think Good is a deft psychological thriller about the insidiousness of domestic abuse.
Gil and Jacques meet young, fall head over heels and then marry quickly thanks to an unexpected pregnancy. But as the dust settles, Gil begins to understand that her relationship is dangerously toxic. Jacques is possessive and controlling: he weaponises their faith against her; isolates her from her friends and family; spies on her; and repeatedly gaslights her. As the threat of physical violence escalates, Gil realises that escape may be the only way to save her life.
Through Think Good, actor-turned-director Géraldine Nakache has crafted a vital and unsettling portrayal of coercive control disguised as love. Building extraordinary narrative anxiety through repeating flashbacks, she immerses viewers in the intricate details of the couple’s Orthodox Judaism, offering an uncommon lens through which to explore the urgent topic of gendered violence. French Canadian actors Monia Chokri and Niels Schneider (reunited 16 years after Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats) pull no punches with their riveting performances: Chokri is breathtaking as Gil is pushed ever further into psychological distress by Jacques; for his part, Schneider had audiences yelling at the screen during the film’s premiere in Cannes.
The Unfaithful Wife/ La femme infidèle
DIRECTOR: Claude Chabrol
COUNTRY: France
LANGUAGE: French
Suspicion, murder and psychosexual paranoia abound in this twisted thriller from French New Wave titan Claude Chabrol, led by a coolly enigmatic performance from Stéphane Audran.
In this exquisitely calibrated homage to Hitchcock, Parisian insurance executive Charles Desvallées (Michel Bouquet, Night and Fog, MIFF 1966) begins to suspect that his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) is having an affair, sending him into an escalating state of paranoia – and towards a plan that will rupture the bourgeois calm of their existence.
With its chilly surfaces, precision staging and dark humour, this deliciously deviant drama finds the great Claude Chabrol (A Story of Women, MIFF 1989; The Butcher, MIFF 1973) on signature form, with the filmmaker’s then-wife Audran (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, MIFF 2000; Les Biches) delivering a glamourous, emotionally opaque performance that’s ripe with depth and mystery. Critically acclaimed but initially unsuccessful with audiences, The Unfaithful Wife has gone on to become one of Chabrol’s most enduring and influential works, serving as the inspiration for both Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s recent Cannes Grand Prix winner Minotaur (MIFF 2026).
Viva Carmen/Carmen, l’oiseau rebelle
DIRECTOR: Sébastien Laudenbach
COUNTRY: France
LANGUAGE: French
This painterly, profound adaptation of Georges Bizet’s iconic opera – told from the perspective of children – wowed Cannes crowds with its incredible use of colour.
Salva (voiced by Milo Machado-Graner, Goodbye, Cruel World, MIFF 2026), Belén, Piranha and La Bola are street kids scrapping for survival on the streets of 19th-century Seville. Salva works for the blind knife grinder Antonio, who foretells a mystical prophecy of the death of free-spirited young Romani woman Carmen, who will be killed by the soldier who loves her. When Salva leaps into action in the hope of saving Carmen from her fate, his actions instead set the prophesy into motion.
From Jacques Feyder’s Carmen (MIFF 1981) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Prénom Carmen (MIFF 1985) through to Mark Dornford-May’s U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (MIFF 2005), Georges Bizet’s iconic opera has proved a fertile text for cinematic adaptations. Animator Sébastien Laudenbach (The Girl Without Hands, MIFF 2016) offers a unique take on the classic text, turning the narrative away from the star-cross’d lovers at the centre of its tragedy and instead presenting it from the perspective of children watching fate unfold. Filled with expressive lines and evocative colours, this gorgeously hand-painted work is a sheer delight for those who treasure the animated artform.
DIRECTOR: Vincent Munier
COUNTRY: France
LANGUAGE: French
This César Best Documentary–winning French box-office smash, with a score featuring Warren Ellis, is a stunning visual and aural immersion into the misty Vosges mountains.
Three generations of nature lovers set out to find the western capercaillie amid the densely wooded and visually spectacular Vosges, a French mountain range close to the German border. Award-winning wildlife photographer and filmmaker Vincent Munier joins his 12-year-old son and father, environmentalist Michel Munier, on a journey through the forest in search of the endangered bird. But even though the capercaillie might be rare here, other wildlife are not. Munier’s camera captures bears, deer, owls and more, in all their visual and sonic glory.
After winning awards in the National History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition three years in a row in his youth, Vincent Munier has in recent times also turned his hand to the moving image. His first feature documentary, The Velvet Queen, charted his quest to find the elusive snow leopard; Whispers in the Woods brings him back to where he grew up, and to a far more personal quest. While Munier’s images are extraordinary, what sets this film apart is how they combine with the sound design (which also scored a César) to highlight the unique aural vibrations of these woods – all underscored by Warren Ellis, Dom La Nena and Rosemary Standley’s score, which itself earned a Lumière Award for Best Music. An exquisite love letter to family and to the wonderful world we live in, Whispers in the Woods is best experienced on the big screen.
Who Are You, Polly Maggoo/Qui êtes-vous Polly Maggoo?
DIRECTOR: William Klein
COUNTRY: France
LANGUAGE: French
Legendary fashion photographer and photojournalist William Klein exploded into narrative filmmaking with this Prix Jean Vigo–winning mockumentary, now a cult record of groovy 1960s mod fashion.
Trailed by a gormless French film crew through Paris, American model Polly (played by director William Klein’s favourite model, Dorothy McGowan) is a mod Alice weaving her way through a stylishly shambolic Wonderland. Right from the famous opening sequence – a runway show in a Gaudi-esque colosseum in which fashionistas coo over models encased in sheet metal – Klein is fascinated with fashion’s theatre of the absurd. His satirical eye finds something solemn, even religious, in the banal pronouncements of fashion editors and the nonsensical questions of TV interviewers, while Polly seems bemused to find herself an object of worship for trend-hungry teens and lecherous men.
Two years before he would make the unnerving American satire Mr. Freedom, Klein skewers the rarefied world of Parisian haute couture and its hangers-on from his privileged position as one of the most subversive photographers to appear in American Vogue. With his sights on the commercialisation of the ‘60s “youthquake”, he mashes up the French New Wave with Beatles caper A Hard Day’s Night, using playful animation that anticipates Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
KEY INFO FOR MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026
WHAT: Melbourne International Film Festival 2026
WHERE: Various venues in Melbourne
WHEN: 6-23 August 2026
HOW & HOW MUCH:
SINGLE TICKETS
Single tickets are priced as follows and can be purchased via the film links above:
- Full $28.55
- Full Off Peak $24.85
- Concession $25.70
- Concession Off Peak $22.40
MULTIPASSES
Multipasses can be shared with friends so if you are going with others you can still take advantage of the discounted pricing.
Multipass 3
- Full price $81.40
- Concession $73.30,
- MIFF Member $69.20
Multipass 6
- Full price $154.20,
- Concession $138,
- MIFF Member $131
Multipass 12
- Full price $291.30,
- Concession $262.20,
- MIFF Member $247.70
You can purchase your Multipass here.
FESTIVAL PASSPORT/ DELUXE MEMBERSHIP
Book a single ticket for every standard session of the festival – only available for deluxe members – buy your deluxe membership for $700 here.
MIFF MEMBERSHIP
Membership prices are as follows:
- Full Membership: $80
- Concession: $70, and
- under 26 : $26
MIFF Membership can be purchased here
Which French-language films are you planning to see at MIFF 2026?
You may also like to check out our article about the multilingual films at MIFF where French is one of the languages spoken
