Coward is set during the Second World War, where soldiers behind the front line try to keep their spirits up; The Man I Love is set in 1980's New York as a theatre artist living with AIDS takes on one last great role; In Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building, Bruno turns 11 in Mexico City during the 1990's. He has feelings for his best friend which clash with the sudden announcement that his father has HIV; and Club Kid tells the story of a washed-up underground party promoter's life which takes an unexpected turn when he is forced to care for a son he never knew he had.

Made of Flesh and Fuel is the story of a lonely French trucker's routine life on the road which takes an unexpected turn when he encounters a Polish driver; La Gradiva features a small group of French high school students who go on a trip to Pompeii to discover its ruins; Jim Queen is a French adult animation about a gay influencer whose life crumbles when he catches heterosis, a virus that turns gay men straight. He teams up with a twink to find a cure, and The Black Ball features three men in three different moments of Spanish history.

Jane Schoenbrun’s horror comedy Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma won the Queer Palm during a ceremony on Friday evening 22nd May. The slasher parody starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson is about a queer filmmaker who is hired to make the latest instalment of a slasher series and play the actress who had a key role in the original movie.

2026 Cannes Film Festival
Photo: John Sears / WikiPortraits

It's more than 20 years since gay director Gus Van Sant won top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival with his film Elephant based on the 1999 Columbine school shootings. The first American to win the prestigious awards since Quentin Tarantino in 1994 for Pulp Fiction, Gus Van Sant got both the Palme d'Or and Best Director honour. Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho with Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix is a gay cult classic and this sensibility is evident in his Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting.

The film he made two decades ago, based around the tragic events in Columbine, remains as upsetting and relevant now as it did all that time ago. In the first few months of this year alone there have been at least 16 school shootings in the United States. The latest just days ago in San Diego, California. The number of school shootings each year was an all time high in 2021, 2022 and again in 2023. Sadly in 2025, a total of 68 incidents were reported, the highest number ever.

In the film Elephant Gus Van Sant went back to the more experimental roots of his fimmaking, using real high school students rather than actors. He's been talking about the film in an exclusive interview with OutUK's Ron Dicker.

"The film definitely has an alternate narrative style and that could easily account for people that aren't wanting to be there," he says.

Van Sant also shrugs off the topic of his sexual identity. Asked if being gay has affected his filmmaking, he replies, "I think it's like, 'Does being gay affect your life?' Yeah, obviously. It does just because it does."

The film gradually reveals more about the killers. They order an automatic rifle through the mail. They kiss each other in the shower before the slaughter.

"I don't think our characters are gay," Van Sant says. "They're just heading to a place where they're going to die. It doesn't matter what they do. The guys that would kiss in the showers at that age were always straight and the guys that wouldn't were gay."

Van Sant renders the ending in chilling verite style. He had intended to make a movie for American television as an "agitprop response" to the tragedy, but the subject was dismissed as taboo.

"It's just not something that is so in your face about answers and causes," Van Sant says of his made-for-HBO feature. "It's more like a song about it."

Van Sant, is best known for Drugstore Cowboy and Good Will Hunting, and for directing Finding Forrester, in which Sean Connery's curmudgeonly author mentors a ghetto prodigy. Although Van Sant's film before Elephant was a slice of existential deep-dish called Gerry, Van Sant says that with the Elephant film he is not necessarily leaving mainstream film-making.

"It might be just a departure from a conventional storytelling," he says. "I don't think of mainstream as unable to accommodate other ways of telling a story."

A stumble in his Psycho remake notwithstanding, Van Sant has enjoyed critical success in both indie and studio fare. The title of his next project is Day at the Beach, a small film of which he reveals nothing. He assures that his current run of alternative cinema is not rooted in any big-studio prejudice.

"I think it's the opposite," says Van Sant, whose boyfriend is an undisclosed actor. "There's a social life within the Hollywood system that is very gay and very open. And when it comes to the actual art, say I as a gay director am talking to Barry Diller as a gay super CEO. And I propose a gay novel. He's thinking about the marketplace. When it comes to the bottom line, it's going to be fiscal and not sexual in nature."

The democracy of money irritates Van Sant. He wishes all films got the green light because of creative merit and earned box office because of the same. It's more than 30 years since he made Mala Noche, his first feature, for a tidy $25,000. A love story about a migrant worker and a liquor-store clerk, it won a Los Angeles Film Critics Award for best experimental film and put him on track to make 1989's Drugstore Cowboy. His tale of a charismatic junkie (Matt Dillon) chasing the next high made the industry establishment take notice.

Van Sant says as he gets older, he feels a greater responsibility to help young gay filmmakers find their way. "I usually tell people they just have to go and do it," he says. "That's how they learn, instead of my mentoring them. Mentoring just means psychological comforting."

Elephant is available on both DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon.