Cannes 2025: the shocking poster we weren’t expecting
One cliché, two faces, and sixty years of encapsulated emotion. The poster for the 78ᵉ Festival de Cannes shows neither a rising star nor a cult director, but an immortal cinema couple.
A man and a woman, reunited forever
This year, the Festival pays tribute to Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant, emblematic figures in Claude Lelouch‘s 1966 Palme d’Or masterpiece Un homme et une femme. On the poster, their mythical embrace on the beach at Deauville reappears, no longer frozen in the past, but revived to embody the spirit of Cannes 2025.
This is the first time the festival has seen double: a woman on one side, a man on the other. A split that isn’t a split at all, but rather an attempt to emphasize that cinema is about union. It’s about bodies, looks and wounded souls coming together in a breath of film.
A cult scene turned icon
The image chosen is not insignificant. It crystallizes the suspended moment that Claude Lelouch captured in three weeks of shooting, after three months of research. It’s the moment when two people, damaged by life, find themselves on an empty beach, under an indifferent but supportive Norman sky.
The kiss, improvised by Trintignant, becomes a symbol. At once intimate and universal, it testifies to a love without effects, sincere and almost silent, as the best of the seventh art knows how to do. In 2022, Trintignant passed away. Two years later, Anouk Aimée joined him. Cannes brings them back to life, together.
More than a tribute: a manifesto
This poster doesn’t just celebrate the past. It reminds us that cinema is memory, emotion, presence. That in a world of special effects and buzz, the heart always beats faster when it’s true.
From May 13 to 24, 2025, Cannes will celebrate what remains beautiful, pure and moving in cinema. And it is through these two embracing bodies that he invites festival-goers not to forget the power of the loving image.
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