Deauville 2026 Competition: The 13 Films

Deauville 2026 unveils an ambitious 13-film competition

The Deauville American Film Festival has revealed the 13 features competing at its 52nd edition, scheduled for September 4–13, 2026. Announced on August 12, the selection brings together emerging filmmakers, actors moving behind the camera and independent productions travelling across periods, regions and genres. Festival director Aude Hesbert presents a programme poised between love and death, cruelty and tenderness, from animation and western-inflected period drama to comedy and coming-of-age cinema. Six entries are billed as French premieres and five as first films, giving the competition a pronounced spirit of discovery.

Period dramas, jazz elegies and lives transformed by loss

Written and directed by Dara Van Dusen, A Prayer for the Dying adapts Stewart O’Nan’s novel and travels to Friendship, Wisconsin, in 1870. Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly lead a drama about a Civil War veteran confronting a deadly threat to the settlement that offered him a second chance. Its French premiere introduces a first feature grounded in moral choice, collective fear and the uneasy aftermath of war.

Another first film, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, is directed by Grant Gee and written by Mark O’Halloran from Intermission by Owen Martell. Led by Anders Danielsen Lie, Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf, it enters the crisis following bassist Scott LaFaro’s death, when pianist Bill Evans withdrew into grief. Music becomes both sanctuary and the audible shape of absence.

In I’ll Be Gone in June, writer-director Katharina Rivilis follows 16-year-old German exchange student Franny, played by Naomi Cosma, in Las Cruces in 2001. Her fragile bond with Elliott, played by Logan Sage, unfolds amid homesickness, desert heat and the shock of 9/11, turning a historical rupture into an intimate story of two adolescents recognising the same loneliness.

New York after dark and families under pressure

Jordan Firstman makes his feature directing debut with Club Kid, playing a New York promoter whose chaotic life is overturned by the arrival of the 10-year-old son he never knew he had. With Cara Delevingne and Diego Calva, the premise places parenthood inside an unstable nightlife ecosystem, turning culture-clash comedy into a test of responsibility and reinvention.

New York takes a different form in Here I’m Alive, directed by Joshua Z. Weinstein and co-written with Brian Perkins. Over one night, migrants, sex workers, dreamers and survivors move through the city’s digital underworld in search of contact. The 76-minute film promises an immersive encounter with people pushed to the metropolis’s edges.

Family bonds drive If I Go Will They Miss Me, written and directed by Walter Thompson-Hernández. Bodhi Dell plays 12-year-old Lil Ant, whose visions of spectral boys reveal a deeper connection to his distant father, played by J. Alphonse Nicholson. With Danielle Brooks, the film links the supernatural to inheritance, neighbourhood memory and all that fathers and sons leave unspoken.

Animation, adolescence and the burden of care

Directed by Leah Nelson, animated feature Méli-Mélo adapts Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir. Julia Louis-Dreyfus voices Sarah, an artist returning from 1990s San Francisco when her mother develops Alzheimer’s disease; Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston, Seth Rogen and Wanda Sykes are also among the voice cast. Animation offers a distinctive route into memory, caregiving and a family’s inability to prepare for irreversible change.

Adolescence is viewed through a friendship rupture in Mouse, directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson from a screenplay by Kelly O’Sullivan. Set in 2002, it follows Minnie and Callie towards senior year until the relationship defining Minnie’s identity abruptly breaks apart. Sophie Okonedo, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Chloe Coleman, Iman Vellani and David Hyde Pierce lead a story about the frightening freedom of becoming visible outside another person’s shadow.
Care becomes an ethical dilemma in Queen at Sea, written, directed and edited by Lance Hammer. Juliette Binoche plays Amanda, who returns to London as dementia erodes her mother’s independence. Alongside Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall, she confronts questions about love, consent, duty and the limits of what one person may decide for another.

Masculinity, secrets and the seduction of escape

Written by Brock Yurich and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Sam McConnell, Test centres on a small-town bodybuilder chasing professional status under his religious mother’s supervision. Following a loss, a mentor introduces him to performance-enhancing drugs and awakens a desire colliding with his upbringing. With Tammy Blanchard and Matthew Morrison, the film treats the body as ambition, armour and battleground.

In Party USA, writer-director Jared Sprouse traps grief inside a party-supply store. After her father’s death, Taylor cannot find anyone to cover her shift, and an ordinary day begins releasing guilt and buried secrets. Starring Ainsley Seiger, Philip Andre Botello, Jordan Gray Burgess and Angie Campbell, the 89-minute film turns workplace absurdity into a reckoning with mourning.

Written and directed by Casey Affleck, Company brings together Nick Nolte, Ben Mendelsohn, Adelaide Clemens and Scoot McNairy. A mysterious traveller relates a multigenerational story connecting three wounded people faced with vengeance or forgiveness. Storytelling becomes the bridge between grief and grace in one of the competition’s French premieres.

Finally, The Liberation of Rita Cooper, directed by Guy Nattiv, follows a woman in 1980s New Jersey who abandons her family for an all-female commune led by the magnetic Ricki. Carrie Coon, Lily James, Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young lead a drama in which spiritual liberation and manipulation may be perilously difficult to separate.

A competition of discovery

The 13 films map American independent cinema in restless transition. First features sit beside established filmmakers, while haunted children, grieving musicians, broken friendships and vulnerable parents suggest an American dream repeatedly lost, questioned and rebuilt.

52nd Deauville American Film Festival — Official Competition

Where: Deauville, Normandy, France — Centre International de Deauville, Cinéma du Casino and Cinéma Morny
When: September 4–13, 2026
What: Thirteen independent features compete across drama, animation, comedy, coming-of-age cinema and period storytelling, with first films and French premieres at the heart of the programme.