Deauville 2026: Stars, Discoveries and 80 Films on the Normandy Coast

The 52nd Deauville American Film Festival brings Ethan Hawke, Brendan Fraser, Faye Dunaway, Susan Sarandon, rising stars, and 80 films to Normandy.

From September 4 to 13, the 52nd Deauville American Film Festival will once again turn the Normandy resort into a meeting place for Hollywood, independent cinema, and French audiences. The official festival lineup includes 80 films across nine categories, with 13 features competing for the main prizes and 22 titles screening in the Premieres section.

The 2026 edition also arrives during a symbolically important year. The United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, while the Statue of Liberty celebrates 140 years since its inauguration in New York. Deauville has placed the Franco-American icon at the center of this year's poster, extending a cultural dialogue that has defined the festival since Lionel Chouchan and André Halimi created it in 1975.

The main jury is chaired by actor and director Roschdy Zem, whose career has moved between popular French cinema and more demanding auteur work. He is joined by Simon Abkarian, Camille Chamoux, Cécile de France, Euzhan Palcy, Raphaël Personnaz, Lola Quivoron, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, and Laura Smet.

Their backgrounds span acting, theater, literature, screenwriting, directing, and producing, giving the nine-member jury an unusually broad perspective on a competition that moves freely between animation, westerns, comedy, period drama, and coming-of-age stories. The jury will announce its awards during the September 12 ceremony. A separate Revelation Jury, chaired by singer and actress Lio, includes Noée Abita, Marion Barbeau, Manon Clavel, and Sayyid El Alami.

The 13-film competition remains the festival's discovery engine. Its stories travel from New York nightlife and 1990s gay San Francisco to working-class Los Angeles neighborhoods, post-Civil War Wisconsin, post-COVID New Mexico, and suburban Florida, Ohio, and Arkansas. Several selections are first features, reinforcing Deauville's long-standing role as a European platform for American independent filmmakers.

Among the competition titles are Dara Van Dusen's A Prayer for the Dying, Jordan Firstman's Club Kid, Casey Affleck's Company, Grant Gee's Everybody Digs Bill Evans, Joshua Z. Weinstein's Here I'm Alive, Katharina Rivilis's I'll Be Gone in June, and Walter Thompson-Hernández's If I Go Will They Miss Me. The competition also includes Leah Nelson's Tangles, Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson's Mouse, Jared Sprouse's Party USA, Lance Hammer's Queen at Sea, Sam McConnell's Test, and Guy Nattiv's The Liberation.

The festival's star tributes connect directly with its screenings. Ethan Hawke will receive a Deauville Talent Award during the September 4 Opening Ceremony before Padraic McKinley's The Weight. The following morning, a beach cabin bearing Hawke's name will be inaugurated on Les Planches. Across nearly four decades, his career has moved from Dead Poets Society and the Before trilogy to Training Day, Boyhood, and First Reformed, while also encompassing writing and directing.

Brendan Fraser receives his own Deauville Talent Award on September 5 before Anthony Maras' Pressure. The film gives its Normandy screening particular resonance: Andrew Scott portrays meteorologist James Stagg, whose forecasts become crucial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, played by Fraser, during the tense days leading to D-Day.

Two Rising-Star Awards highlight very different emerging careers. Sophie Thatcher will be honored on September 5, the same evening Nicolas Winding Refn presents Her Private Hell. Her path from Chicago theater through Prospect, Yellowjackets, The Boogeyman, Heretic, and Companion has made her closely associated with genre stories exploring identity, control, and psychological tension.

On September 11, Patrick Schwarzenegger receives the festival's second Rising-Star Award before Florian Zeller's Bunker, in which he appears alongside Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Stephen Graham, and Paul Dano.

Deauville will also honor two defining figures of American screen history. Faye Dunaway receives the Deauville Icon Award on September 8, celebrating a career that stretches from Bonnie and Clyde and The Thomas Crown Affair to Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor, and her Oscar-winning performance in Network. Her ceremony is paired with Noah Segan's The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.

On September 10, Susan Sarandon receives a Deauville Icon Award before Zach Woods' The Accompanist, in which she stars. Her filmography, from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Atlantic City to Thelma & Louise and her Oscar-winning Dead Man Walking, makes the tribute another bridge between Deauville's celebration of film history and its continuing interest in new work.

The Premieres selection is particularly eclectic. Florian Zeller's Bunker turns a billionaire's survival shelter into a moral and marital crisis, while Olivia Wilde's The Invite brings Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, Seth Rogen, and Edward Norton around a destabilizing dinner table. David Lowery's Mother Mary reunites a pop superstar played by Anne Hathaway with a former costume designer played by Michaela Coel.

Kantemir Balagov's Butterfly Jam follows a teenage wrestler within a Circassian family in New Jersey, while Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma uses the attempted revival of a slasher franchise to explore desire, fear, and filmmaking. Deauville itself becomes part of the fiction in Jaime Adams' Only What We Carry, set along the Normandy coast.

The 2026 program makes Deauville's dual identity unusually visible. New work sits alongside films including Joe Dante's Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Lisa Cholodenko's High Art, Brady Corbet's The Childhood of a Leader, and Martha Coolidge's deeply personal Not a Pretty Picture. A separate "Once Upon a Time (in) America" program also looks back across 250 years of American history through 15 films.

The result is less a simple parade of premieres than a conversation across generations. That is also why the Statue of Liberty poster feels like more than decoration. A French-made American monument becomes the emblem of a festival built around cultural exchange at a moment when many of its films are exploring fractured communities, uncertain futures, and the continuing pursuit of freedom.
 

Complete 2026 Deauville Competition and Premieres Lineup

Competition: A Prayer for the Dying — Dara Van Dusen; Club Kid — Jordan Firstman; Company — Casey Affleck; Everybody Digs Bill Evans — Grant Gee; Here I'm Alive — Joshua Z. Weinstein; I'll Be Gone in June — Katharina Rivilis; If I Go Will They Miss Me — Walter Thompson-Hernández; Tangles — Leah Nelson; Mouse — Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson; Party USA — Jared Sprouse; Queen at Sea — Lance Hammer; Test — Sam McConnell; The Liberation — Guy Nattiv.

Premieres: Pressure — Anthony Maras; Bunker — Florian Zeller; Gremlins 2: The New Batch — Joe Dante; Diamond — Andy Garcia; Her Private Hell — Nicolas Winding Refn; High Art — Lisa Cholodenko; The Childhood of a Leader — Brady Corbet; Forgotten Island — Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado; The Invite — Olivia Wilde; Mother Mary — David Lowery; The Weight — Padraic McKinley; Only What We Carry — Jaime Adams; Victorian Psycho — Zachary Wigon; Butterfly Jam — Kantemir Balagov; Stop! That! Train! — Adam Shankman; Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — Jane Schoenbrun; The Accompanist — Zach Woods; The Last Day — Rachel Rose; The Only Living Pickpocket in New York — Noah Segan; The Man I Love — Ira Sachs; Where to Land — Hal Hartley; Not a Pretty Picture — Martha Coolidge.