Five New Cinematic Worlds Between Ithaca, Paris and Gujarat

Paris – 18 July 2026: The cinema week that began in France on 15 July spans an unusually wide arc: from Homer’s Mediterranean to nocturnal Paris and an Indian village. Five films that could hardly be more different are united by a delight in grand storytelling – and by the question of how people find their way home, remember, or escape a reality that has become too confining for them.

Christopher Nolan claims the largest screen with “The Odyssey”. His almost three-hour adaptation of the Homeric epic follows Odysseus on his perilous journey back to Ithaca. Matt Damon plays the cunning king, while Tom Holland and Anne Hathaway are also among the cast. Nolan relies on the grand IMAX format, yet the ancient material is more than a mere display of technical muscle: at its center is a man whom the end of a war does not free, but instead sends into his true ordeal.

Elie Wajeman’s “Comet” casts a very different gaze on Paris. As a comet appears in the sky, the paths of eighteen characters cross in a city that seems both wide awake and strangely detached. Vincent Macaigne, Sandor Funtek and Alexia Chardard lead this ensemble. The film combines a crime story, romantic entanglements, comedy and melancholy; its Parisian night has, as befits the appearance of a comet, something promising and something faintly unsettling.

With “The Dreamed Adventure”, German director Valeska Grisebach returns to a world on Europe’s margins. Her archaeologist Veska lives in Svilengrad, a Bulgarian border town near Greece and Turkey. When she tries to help a friend, she enters the sphere of influence of criminal structures. Grisebach, whose film competed at Cannes and received the Jury Prize, turns this setup into a quiet female western: the heroine watches for a long time before she acts.

Anders Thomas Jensen lets two brothers stagger through a dark, distinctly Nordic farce in “The Last Viking”. A bank robber seeks his loot after fifteen years in prison; his brother knows the hiding place, but lives with the wounds of a childhood that cannot simply be played away. Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas combine absurd comedy with a remarkably tender story about guilt, memory and family loyalty.

Pan Nalin’s “Last Film Show”, which also opened in French cinemas on 15 July, is the quietest of them all. In rural Gujarat, nine-year-old Samay discovers cinema around 2010 and secretly befriends the projectionist. As the 35-millimeter era fades, the projection booth becomes the setting for an initiation. After all the heroic journeys, crimes and signs in the sky, this film reminds us that a first encounter with a screen can still be a small miracle.