17/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: 94-year-old director Alain Cavalier’s documentary is a melancholic yet humorous meditation on cinema and its power to fight back against mortality

Screening as part of the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Thanks for Coming is Alain Cavalier’s testament to cinema and to life, sprinkled with a touch of melancholy and humour.

In fact, there is no logic at all in its structure. Random characters show up on screen, then disappear, then come back again. In the background, for most of the film, we hear Cavalier’s voice-over. The rough starting point for the story is the end of the shoot for Pater, starring Vincent Lindon, and its subsequent screening at Cannes. The sarcastic comments on the festival and the footage from the Croisette of 15 years ago resonate perfectly with the screening of this film in the same surroundings.

At age 94, the legendary French director brings a movie to Cannes that is very hard to judge through an objective lens, as it’s almost impossible to separate the film from the genius. It could be summarised succinctly as follows: it’s not difficult to suspect that if this film had been made by an unknown helmer, it might easily have gone unnoticed. At times, though, this is exactly the point of works like this: they are watched because of who made them as much as for their intrinsic merits. And there’s definitely nothing wrong with that.

Nonetheless, the documentary is genuinely funny and reflective, without ever becoming heavy-handed. Cavalier films himself talking to a cloud or lingers on a scene of a seagull swallowing a fish in a very comedic manner (a moment that seems to have been an audience favourite). These sequences, some banal and others much deeper, alternate with each other, creating a rollercoaster that keeps one’s attention high during the 82 minutes of the film. Quite a few times, amidst this stream of thoughts and events, death rears its head. Strangely, the focus is not on Cavalier’s death; it is rather always represented by something external. It appears in the section dedicated to his friend Emmanuèle Bernheim, who passed away prematurely from cancer before being able to collaborate with him on a film, or in the unsettling close-up of the director’s dead brother lying in his coffin. Animals are also mortal beings, as the tragic death of a beloved cat (belonging to the director’s current partner, Françoise Widhoff) reminds us.

The sense of immortality granted by filming is strong and permeates every scene. “I am a shadow, which is very pleasant,” Cavalier says at one point. The line feels like it’s able to sum up the entire documentary, as almost no sentence is left devoid of meaning by the careful editing, even when it initially appears out of context. All in all, Thanks for Coming may well prove to be a hard film to digest for the general public, especially for those who are not French, as it's a movie steeped in that country’s culture and humour. But for those who are familiar with a different approach to cinema, it may be a very refreshing watch and be fully appreciated as the moving swan song of a talented filmmaker.

Thanks for Coming was produced and is sold by France’s Camera One.