by Alex Billington
May 10, 2026
Source: YouTube
“How can I imagine make a movie about you, while knowing that you were deliberately elusive?” Visual Antics has debuted the the first official trailer for the festival premiere of the unique documentary film titled Nostalgia for the Future, made by Brussels-based visual artist Brecht Debackere. It’s premiering soon at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival in the Cannes Classics section, as it’s a film about a French filmmaker known as Chris Marker (real name: Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve). Guided by narration from Charlotte Rampling speaking in English, the doc is a descent into the labyrinthine world of Chris Marker, the “best-known author of unknown films” (director of La Jetée), who spent a lifetime concealing himself behind a veil of pseudonyms and images of cats. The film examines troves of his artifacts and collections, trying to piece together who he was and the choices he made in life through what he left behind –”transforming the archive into a landscape of living memory.” Nostalgia for the Future is a meditation on memory, identity, & the power our past images hold over the futures we imagine. Cinema geeks should definitely watch out for it.
Festival trailer (+ poster) for Brecht Debackere’s doc Nostalgia for the Future, on YouTube (via TFS):
“I never intended to make a conventional documentary. How do you introduce an audience to a figure who exists almost entirely without biographical data? In the absence of traditional interviews, I chose to follow the associative logic of the work itself: the invisible threads connecting history, philosophy, and folklore. In doing so, I found myself confronted with the archive not as a graveyard, but as a living system of memory. This film isn’t a ledger of dates and locations; it is a portrait in the abstract. It is an attempt to capture a state of mind that combined lyrical imagination with ethical depth. One eye scanning the past, the other on the future, and both feet planted firmly in the present. In a world of slick, shrink-wrapped media, I am drawn to Marker’s stubborn insistence on the fragment, the tangent, and the human complexity of the image.” –Director Brecht Debackere
Via Cannes: Guided by the narration of Charlotte Rampling, Nostalgia for the Future is a descent into the labyrinthine world of Chris Marker, the “best-known author of unknown films,” who spent a lifetime concealing himself behind a veil of pseudonyms and images of cats. Moving through a constellation of personal documents and film fragments, an archivist attempts to decode the man through the material traces he left behind. By repurposing and recontextualizing Marker’s own body of work, the film treats his images as “time machines,” transforming the archive into a landscape of living memory. Nostalgia for the Future is a meditation on memory, identity & the power our past images hold over the futures we imagine.
Nostalgia for the Future is a documentary directed by Brussels-based international filmmaker / visual artist Brecht Debackere, director of the film Exprmntl previously and other experimental art projects; he works at the Audiovisual Arts at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound (RITCS) in Brussels. Executive produced by Steven Dhoedt. This is premiering at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival this month playing in the Cannes Classics section. No other release dates are set. For more info, visit the film’s official site. Intrigued?
