Foreign films showcased at Cannes that truly moved us

There’s something about Cannes. Maybe it’s the cinematic grandeur, the air lingering with the fragrance of salty sea breeze and Chanel No. 5, or the silence in the theatre when the lights dim and the first frame flickers to life. We may be a thousand miles away from the stories unfolding on and off the screen, but they feel eerily close—echoes of our childhoods, of people we’ve loved, of parts of ourselves we rarely admit exist. Below are films from Cannes Film Festival, over the years, that broke our hearts, stitched them back together, and left something quietly glowing in their place.

Paris, Texas (1984) 

A man walks out of the desert, hollow-eyed and mute, searching for the family he left behind. That’s it. That’s the whole plot. The loneliness here isn’t dramatic—it’s slow, persistent, and tender. The kind of ache that creeps in when you think of someone you once loved, and wonder if they still think of you. This is a film that whispers rather than shouts, and in that whisper, it tells the truth about what we lose when we disappear from each other’s lives. It’s not a film about forgiveness. It’s about the aching space where  forgiveness could be.

La Haine (1995) 

Shot in black and white, La Haine is a punch in your gut. It follows 24 hours in the lives of three young men haunted by poverty, anger, and invisibility. But beneath the violence and graffiti is a tenderness, raw and restless. The rage is real, but so is the love. In every stolen glance, every sarcastic jab, every cigarette passed between friends, there’s a loyalty that speaks louder than any monologue. La Haine lingers like the sting of something important left unsaid. You don’t watch it. You carry it with you, like a bruise you forgot was there.

The Pianist (2002) 

Władysław Szpilman, a Jewish pianist in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, loses everything—his family, his home, his music—and somehow keeps surviving. He doesn’t fight. He doesn’t scream. He simply endures. There’s a quiet devastation to this kind of survival. You watch him slip through shadows, holding on to music like it’s breath itself. When he plays the imaginary piano with trembling fingers, it feels like prayer. This isn’t a war film. It’s a film about what remains when the war inside you never ends.

The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012) 

It begins with love—fierce, wild, heady love between a tattoo artist and a bluegrass musician. Then life does what it always does: it breaks them. Their daughter gets sick. They lose her. They don’t know how to be together or away. There’s no distance here. No metaphor. You feel it all. The way grief coils around daily life. The way love, once so loud, becomes a memory with a soundtrack. It hits like a breakup song you weren’t ready to hear again. It’s not about who dies. It’s about who’s left behind—and what they do with the silence.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023) 

A man falls from a balcony. His wife is accused of murder. Their blind son is the only person who might know what happened. That’s the premise. But what unfolds is a slow unraveling of love, trust, and the stories we tell to survive each other. This film doesn’t offer answers. It offers layers. Marital compromise,  parental guilt, the version of yourself you present in public versus the one that surfaces at home—it’s all held up to the light, like an X-ray. Some bones are broken. Others never healed right. It’s not just a whodunnit. It’s a what-was-broken-long-before-the-fall.

We return to these films not because they moved us once, but because they continue to echo in the quietest corners of our memory. They remind us that cinema’s most lasting impact isn’t loud. It lingers. And this year, at Cannes, that same feeling found its way back. Here are three such films from the 2025 selection—quietly devastating, beautifully human, and destined to stay with you long after the credits roll.

Sentimental Value (2025) 

Grief enters first. Then, inevitably, comes memory. In Sentimental Value, grief doesn't arrive with clarity but with the fog of misunderstanding that lingers between a father and his daughters who've never quite managed to meet in the middle. Gustav Borg, a once-renowned filmmaker, returns to his ancestral Oslo home following the death of his ex-wife. His reappearance disrupts the lives of his daughters: Nora, a successful yet emotionally fragile stage actress, and Agnes, who has chosen a more conventional path. Trier doesn't dramatise the grief; he lets it settle like dust on old tapes, in half-spoken apologies, in rooms where both know how to perform but not how to be. There are no villains here. Only people trying, and often failing, to reach one another. It's not a story of reconciliation. It's a story of recognition. And that, sometimes, is enough.

Alpha (2025) 

Set in the shadow of 1980s New York, Alpha follows a young girl navigating a world unraveling around her. Something unnamed, unspoken, is changing her family. The grown-ups won’t explain, so she invents her logic. In her mind, the fear takes shape: bodies mutate, dreams distort, love becomes monstrous and tender in the same breath. Ducournau’s genius lies in metaphor. She doesn’t depict AIDS so much as channel the unspoken dread that surrounded it, especially for those too young to understand, yet not too young to feel its weight. The result is devastating and surreal: a child’s attempt to map grief onto a world that won’t offer her answers. It’s not a horror film. It’s grief dressed as myth, because naming it would make it all too real.

The History of Sound (2025) 

 

Two men. One war. A road trip across America, recording voices before they’re lost to history. And somewhere in the static, a love story begins—quiet, careful, unsaid. This isn’t a film of declarations. It’s a film of glances, near-touches, and feelings too fragile to name. When the story ends, what lingers isn’t just the love that couldn’t last. It’s the intimacy of having witnessed it at all. The History of Sound isn’t about what love becomes. It’s about what it leaves behind. 

Cannes reminds us that art doesn’t ask to be understood—it asks to be felt. When a Turkish father pulls his son into a quiet embrace, when a French girl lights her last cigarette with more sorrow than smoke, when a Japanese man whispers Chekhov into the stillness of a red Saab—we don’t hear them in foreign languages, we hear them in stillness. In heartbreak. In something older than words. For those few sacred hours in the dark, we’re not decoding subtitles or scanning expressions. We are simply watching—and feeling—like it’s our own story unfolding. Not as outsiders. But as people who’ve known love, loss, and everything in between.

Lead image: Getty Images

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