Queer Palm: THE 2026 WINNERS

With the most glitter-drenched blood in the history of horror cinema and a soundtrack packed with bangers, the jury awards the Queer Palm 2026 to Teenage, Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun.

“Cinema is a powerful tool — films colonize our imaginations — sometimes despite us, sometimes against us — but they can also become the site of their own repair. This is what the work we are honoring tonight demonstrates brilliantly, never taking itself too seriously, while asking a very serious question: how does what we consume shape us?

The film’s heroine lives exclusively on candy and mass-produced chocolate bars. Junk. Chemical sugar, artificial coloring, garish packaging. The same goes for films. What we swallow — in secret, in hiding, under the covers, in the dark of a child’s bedroom or a poorly lit video rental store — ends up becoming part of us, structuring our desires, our fears, our relationship to others, our way of seeing ourselves in the mirror.

For an entire generation, the slasher film shaped a relationship to sexuality, the body, adolescence, death, and difference. Horror cinema — its narrative frameworks, its recurring motifs — makes us shudder, but has also served as a vehicle for misogyny and transphobia.

Rather than condemning, this film proposes to repair. To reclaim a genre long relegated to the margins of cinema — and to make it a tool for today. A popular, joyful, thoroughly researched cinema, freed from a heteronormative, hetero-centric mold, connecting this genre to other stories, other bodies, other journeys. Here, the journey of two women finding their way toward reconciliation with their own sexuality.

Descending into a hole at the bottom of a frozen lake, only to resurface in the light of spring.

Returning to the DNA of the genre so that it may illuminate us today.
A tribute to cinema as a tool of repair — both intimate and collective.
Hannah Einbinder embodies the first “final girl” of a new generation, while Gillian Anderson, a dazzling original “final girl,” is the icon she truly is — and has been — for multiple generations “ 

  The 2026 Queer Palm jury has chosen to award the Discovery Prize to Du Fioul dans les Artères by Pierre Le Gall. ”

“An exceptional selection calls for an exceptional response: the 2026 Queer Palm jury will not follow the usual playbook. We wanted to create a discovery award to recognize, as the name suggests, a discovery… in the broadest sense of the word. This year, it is the discovery of a filmmaker.

This film takes us where few gazes linger: into lives that roll, that deliver, that vanish into the flow of motorways and the blind spots of our awareness. Road workers form an immense and invisible community, whose working conditions are nonetheless the very condition of our daily lives. This film gives the men and women of the road a presence. Faces. Dignity.
It reveals the tenderness of a nascent love story set against the harshness of the job.

Because how does one love when working conditions devour time, when employers dictate the pace? How does love blossom in a Europe of markets? How does love find its place on the tarmac of a motorway bridge or in the narrow confines of a truck cab?

The director brought his camera aboard an obstinate romance: the stubborn gentleness of two people trying to find their way to each other. Across schedules. Across noise and cold. Across Europe. Precarity. Borders. He shows how thwarted love, like water, always finds a way — and that a person can have the courage to cross a motorway, but not to walk into some bloody trendy bar.

Alexis Manenti and Julian Swiezewski embody the heroes who were missing from the pantheon of great lovers.

This is a first film that undeniably lengthens the list of great love stories ever put to screen.

 The winner of the Queer Palm for Best Short Film is Silent Voices by Nadine Misong Jin.“

The short film we have chosen to honor tonight is a subtle, understated work that focuses on sensations rather than on what is said.  It gracefully conveys, through its visuals, a sense of both tension and tenderness. With great sensitivity, the film accurately captures the gestures of everyday life.  

In an era marked by violence and hostility, the director chooses to present queer culture as a possibility, a glimmer of hope, that needs no justification.

Her remarkable cast takes us on a journey through a bustling metropolis where we discover a torn family, whose bond is expressed solely through silence…  

We were thrilled to see this new voice emerge, and we can’t wait to see what comes next.“