April 22, 2025, 1:01pm

It’s your annoying cinephile friend’s favorite time of year. In a few short weeks, the Cannes Film Festival will run roughshod over the French riviera from May 13-May 24. Some exciting pictures will compete for the coveted Palme d’Or this year—including many literary adaptations.

Now, indie-heads, fear not. Original films from Kelly Reichardt, Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson, and Ari Aster are possible grounds for a little American artist pride. But pre-existing IP is as inspiring to filmmakers as ever it was.

For the curious or Cannes-bounds, here are all the literary films coming first to France, then (sometime after) to a screen near you.

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Competing in the coveted “Official Selection” category, Hafsia Herzi’s The Last One is an adaptation of Fatima Daas’s 2020 novel of the same title. David Hudson at The Current calls the film, which is set in a Paris suburb, “a groundbreaking work of autofiction about a queer Muslim woman coming to terms with her sexuality and faith.”

Elsewhere in the main competition, two of the internet’s boyfriends (Josh O’Connor, Paul Mescal) will star in a new feature from Oliver Hermanus. The History of Sound is adapted from a short story in Ben Shattuck’s 2024 collection of the same name. Set in the aftermath of World War I, this elegant historical fiction follows two “men who set out to record the lives, voices, and music” of their fellow New Englanders.

Stéphane Demoustier’s L’inconnu de la Grande Arche is an adaptation of Laurence Cossé’s 2016 novel, La Grande Arche. Set in the opulent 80s, the books follows the competition to design a monument to the French Revolution.

UK-based filmmaker Harry Lighton’s first feature, Pillion, is an adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones’s 2020 novel Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem. This slice of a novel follows a young queer man coming into self and sexuality in the 1970s. Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård play the vexing central couple.

And rounding out this category, the documentarian Sergei Loznitsa turns his tricks to fiction with a new feature adaptation of Georgy Demidov’s Two Prosecutors. This 1937 political thriller follows the travails of a young lawyer who “receives an anonymous letter written in blood.” Demidov, a Societ physicist, Trotskyist, and political prisoner, had his entire canon seized by the USSR before his untimely death. So it’s extra nice to see his eerily prescient work reclaimed for a wider audience.

Competing in the “Un Certain Regard” competition, which celebrates off-the-beaten-path work, is Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of Hills. This adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel follows a widow and her daughter who’ve survived the bombing of Nagasaki.

And in another un certain film, the writer is the subject. Mario Martone’s Fuori is a biopic of the late writer/actor/feminist icon Goliarda Sapienza. The radical author of The Art of Joy should be on your radar, so keep an ear out for this stateside distribution deal.

Back in documentary land, the festival will feature a special screening of Sylvain Chomet’s A Magnificent Life, an “animated salute” to the beloved French auteur Marcel Pagnol.

Also out of competition, the stylish documentarian Raoul Peck will be premiering a new documentary on George Orwell. Orwell: 2+2=5 looks at the late writer’s final months and prophetic legacy against a rising climate of authoritarianism.

Let no one say they’re out of touch on the beach.