First image of Barry Keoghan and Riley Keough in Butterfly Jam

The film will be screened at the opening of the Cannes 2026 Filmmakers’ Fortnight.

Seven years later A big girlthe Russian director, Kantemir Balagov, returns with a third feature film, the drama Butterfly Jam, which will open the 58th edition of the Filmmakers’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. The film features a teenager, Pyteh, from a Russian minority in New Jersey, prematurely confronted with the violence of the adult world…

The filmmaker has a 5-star cast… We will find Barry Keoghan who will play the main role as well as the American actress Riley Keough and the British actor Harry Melling. This is the first time that the three performers have been brought together.

Clearly, Barry Keoghan is everywhere. If we found him this year in the Netflix film, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal and Prime Video production, Crime 101he will also star in the highly anticipated Sam Mendes biopic, The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Eventthe first images of which were revealed in January. Riley Keough is making her comeback, three years after the successful mini-series, Daisy Jones and The Six. As for Harry Melling, he was in the casting of Pillionhighly acclaimed by critics.

This is not the first time that Kantemir Balagov has walked the red carpet of the Croisette… In 2017, he received the Fipresci Prize for his first feature film, Tesnota, a cramped life, in the section A certain look. Two years later, he returned to Cannes for a second film, A big girland left with the same Prize but also that of the staging, still in the section A certain look... Today is the Filmmakers’ Fortnight that the director seduced with his latest film.

If the filmmaker featured female characters with very similar identities in his first feature films – women marginalized because of their physique and in difficult social situations – it is a male protagonist that we will follow this time in this latest film.

Butterfly Jam is one of the curiosities of this 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival.

Synopsis: “The difficult relationship between Pyteh, a 15-year-old boy, and his father, within the Kabardian community (originating from the Caucasus) of Newark in the United States. Torn between his admiration for his father and his recent disillusionments, Pyteh finds himself confronted with violence which will force him to grow up faster than he wishes.”

As of yet, no release date has been announced.