Sandra Wollner's Everytime won the top prize in Un Certain Regard at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is the Austrian director's third feature and her Cannes debut, following The Trouble with Being Born, the provocative film that put her on the map at the Berlinale in 2020.
The premise is simple and brutal. A Berlin family, a mother and her two daughters, are about to leave for a holiday in Tenerife when the eldest daughter sneaks out for a night of partying and dies. The film does not linger on how. A year later, the mother and younger sister make the trip anyway, joined by the dead girl's boyfriend, and under the Canary Islands sun the past and present begin to bleed into each other. Birgit Minichmayr plays the mother, in a performance critics singled out as the film's anchor.
What reviewers kept noting was the restraint. There are no big speeches, no tidy moments of breakthrough. Wollner stays in the texture of ordinary life continuing after something irreversible, and she lets the unease build out of unremarkable images: a long shot of a building, a text sent to someone who is gone. Several critics called it the best thing they saw at the festival.
Why it matters
Un Certain Regard is worth understanding, because this is exactly the kind of film it exists to find. The section is no longer the consolation bracket for movies that missed the main competition. It is built to showcase younger directors with one or two films behind them, the ones who tend to graduate to the Palme d'Or race a few years later. The discoveries here are often more interesting than the headline competition.
That is the case we want to make to anyone who tracks Cannes only through the Palme winner. The prize that gets the cameras is rarely the whole story. The film that actually stays with people is often the quiet one playing in the parallel section, the one most coverage walks past on its way to the red carpet. Everytime looks like this year's example, and it is the sort of title this site exists to put in front of you before the noise dies down.
Everytime is handled internationally by Charades, with festival and distribution dates still being set.
About this film
