The exploding evidence is impossible to ignore anymore at the ongoing 79th annual Cannes Film Festival. Indian celebrities have dominated digital coverage from the Croisette: Alia Bhatt’s red carpet appearances generated days of fashion discourse; get-ready-with-me breakdowns and couture analyses have been flooding entertainment portals; influencer accounts are being tracked with the intensity once reserved for Competition premieres.
Extensive roundups of Indian red-carpet looks are all over social media. Legacy media coverage is no different either. The focus has been almost entirely on celebrity arrivals, looks, what and who they are wearing, what they are eating, where they are staying, what’s in their bag, pinch-me stories of content creators and viral moments that have little to do with cinema.
At the same festival, however, India’s actual cinematic footprint continues to remain comparatively modest. The country’s most significant institutional presence this year came in the form of Payal Kapadia serving as the president of the Critics’ Week jury — a remarkable achievement following the historic Grand Prix win of her debut feature film All We Imagine As Light in 2024.
This growing, concerning chasm is fast becoming the defining image of India at Cannes: enormous visibility, uneven cinematic presence.
Over the last decade, Cannes has increasingly functioned in India less as a film festival and more as a luxury-content ecosystem. The event still matters deeply to filmmakers, distributors, programmers and critics globally. But in the Indian media imagination, it now functions like the Met Gala — a spectacle-first arena where fashion virality often eclipses cinema itself.
This is not merely a matter of shallow, fluffy coverage. It reflects a larger transformation in how India understands cultural prestige.
The modern Cannes economy runs on two parallel systems. One is cinematic influence: competition slots, critical acclaim, acquisitions, distribution deals and auteur breakthroughs. The other is visibility: red carpets, luxury branding, influencer amplification and social-media circulation. India has become extraordinarily successful at the second but remains shabbily inconsistent at the first.
Indian entertainment reporting around Cannes 2026 illustrates the imbalance almost perfectly. It has overwhelmingly foregrounded celebrity styling, brand affiliations and viral fashion moments. Entire news cycles have been drummed around Bhatt’s many dreamy appearances, debates over her sartorial choices, reception at the red carpet, and discussions about whether Indian celebrities were able to juice out the opportunity sufficiently. Meanwhile, actual discussions about festival programming, acquisitions or the global positioning of Indian cinema have remained comparatively thin.
This dichotomy is proliferating because spectacle is now more economically valuable than criticism. Digital entertainment journalism has been increasingly rewarding immediacy over analysis. Fashion carousels generate more traffic than cultural commentary centering on cinema. Celebrity content is much easier to monetize than festival coverage because it plugs directly into aspirational consumer culture. The talk around Cannes, especially in India, has therefore reduced to luxury fashion, beauty marketing, influencer culture and celebrity branding.
The festival itself encourages this fashion-forward, spectacle-first approach. Cannes has always fed on glamour mythology. But India’s relationship with it has intensified in the social-media era because our entertainment economy now treats visibility as a form of achievement in itself.
One striking detail from this year’s coverage is how frequently Indian presence at Cannes was framed through symbolic occupation rather than cinematic competition. Media reports repeatedly described India “taking over” Cannes through celebrity appearances, fashion moments and creator-led content. Brut’s live coverage of the French Riviera explicitly noted that the festival has become “a major international platform for Bollywood, luxury fashion, beauty brands and Indian creators making a global impact.”
That language is revealing. Cinema is now only one component of the ecosystem — and not always the dominant one.
The worrying proliferation of influencers at Cannes has accelerated this shift further. Last year, as the contingent of Indian content creators ballooned up rather garishly at Cannes, I how the rapid shift in focus was usurping the festival’s raison d’être. No longer one of the most anticipated cinema events of the year, Cannes is now transformed into a content-production arena. The result is a peculiar inversion: Indian celebrities often receive more domestic attention for walking the red carpet than Indian filmmakers receive for actually screening films there.
This would have sounded absurd during the era of Satyajit Ray, whose recognition in the international film festival circuit fundamentally reshaped how global audiences understood Indian cinema. Ray’s presence at Cannes, Venice and Berlin was not ornamental. It altered film history. His reputation emerged from artistic innovation, not from proximity to luxury branding.
Today, however, India’s soft-power ambitions increasingly operate through optics. Cannes provides a highly visible stage on which India can project glamour, scale and cosmopolitan confidence to the world. The India Pavilion, celebrity delegations and fashion-heavy media coverage all contribute to the impression of international centrality. But visibility and influence are not the same thing.
A country can dominate social-media conversation at Cannes while remaining peripheral inside the festival’s most important cinematic conversations. That has often been India’s predicament. Despite being one of the world’s largest film-producing nations, our representation in Cannes Competition has historically remained sporadic.
Which is why Kapadia’s unexpected emergence two years ago felt so seismic. When All We Imagine As Light entered Competition in 2024, it became the first Indian film to compete in the main section in three decades. The film went on to win the Grand Prix—the second highest prize at Cannes after Palme d’Or—and received extraordinary international acclaim. The achievement mattered not because it produced viral glamour, but because it restored India to the centre of a serious global cinematic conversation.
Rousing recognition at Cannes altered the film’s trajectory almost entirely. Kapadia later said the festival premiere helped strengthen the film’s domestic distribution prospects, which exposes another uncomfortable reality about Indian cinema—many independent Indian films still require international validation to be treated seriously at home.
Meanwhile, celebrity attendance at Cannes continues to expand because it offers immediate returns. A red-carpet appearance produces instant metrics — impressions, engagement, trend cycles, brand visibility. However, artistic prestige works differently. It requires slower investment in film culture: festival infrastructure, script development, public funding, international co-production systems and robust criticism.
Countries such as South Korea spent decades building those ecosystems before global recognition arrived at scale. India, by contrast, often appears more interested in the performance of global relevance than in the institutional labour required to sustain it artistically.
In spite of it all, I don’t mean to suggest that Indian celebrities should stop attending Cannes. But the current imbalance reveals how profoundly India’s media culture has shifted away from cinema criticism toward celebrity amplification.
Indian coverage now treats Cannes less as a site where films compete and more as a backdrop against which fame performs itself internationally. That is because spectacle is easier to export than artistic risk. Risk produces uncertain outcomes. Spectacle photographs beautifully. But film history rarely remembers who generated the most viral red-carpet content. It remembers who changed cinema.