Ep. 393: Jordan Cronk on Cannes 2026: Directors’ Fortnight Preview, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Nagi Notes, Butterfly Jam, plus Play-Doc retro + Jeonju

Ep. 393: Jordan Cronk on Cannes 2026: Directors’ Fortnight Preview, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Nagi Notes, Butterfly Jam, plus Play-Doc retro + Jeonju

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, I’m very happy to start the big show with Jordan Cronk, critic and programmer. We discussed a few films from the first full day of programming: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (directed by Jane Schoenbrun, starring Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder), Nagi Notes (Koji Fukada), and Butterfly Jam (Kantemir Balagov, starring Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough, Harry Messing). But I was also treated to a preview of Directors’ Fortnight, the Cannes showcase where Cronk is also a program advisor, and which this year includes films by Radu Jude, Alain Cavalier, Dominga Sotomayor, Lisandro Alonso, longtime Apichatpong Weerasethakul collaborator Sompot Chidgasornpongse, Clio Barnard, and Bruno Dumont.

But that's not all! Cronk also shares a highlight from two festivals he visited just before Cannes: Play-Doc in Galicia, Spain, where he saw a very intriguing retrospective, and the Jeonju International Film Festival in Jeonju, South Korea.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass