Presented at Cannes and co-produced by the Palais de Tokyo, the film La Sentinelle is projected alongside a new installation work, in an exhibition that offers an immersion in the effects of war on individuals and on their imaginaries.
Aerial pirouettes, weapons and uniforms, pyrotechnic flourishes: the Bastille Day parade stages a demonstration of power beneath the camouflage face of a disciplined republic. This tension between emancipation and constraint, sacrifice and the violence of authority lies at the heart of the film presented within Ali Cherri‘s exhibition. La Sentinelle examines the contemporary place of the soldier in a wounded present, using 35mm film to trace the impact of conflict on bodies, landscapes and imaginaries. This 29-minute short film, co- produced with the support of the Palais de Tokyo, was presented at the 65th Critics’ Week of the Cannes Film Festival in 2026 unfold.
The cinema of French-Lebanese artist Ali Cherri is distinguished by its relationship to reality and its use of non-professional actors playing versions of themselves. For the first time, La Sentinelle moves into the realm of fiction. Filmed in France, within carefully composed painterly settings and an indeterminate temporality, the work brings together Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Éric Cantona and Georges Torbey (Sbete), three figures chosen as much for their aura as for their physical presence. As the artist states, “Reality is no longer enough to speak of reality.” It is within this regime of representation that these tensions and instabilities unfold.
The reality of the present is marked by the return of rearmament rhetoric. After the era of “clean wars”, which claimed to dematerialise human presence through technology, the soldier’s body has once again become central to political narratives and media imagery. La Sentinelle questions this imperative to prepare society for the acceptance of bodies destined for death. Fragile, caught between drowsiness and a lingering childhood melancholy, the soldier Lafleur silently resists what the institution demands of him.
For the past three decades, Ali Cherri has worked across a wide range of media, from film and sculpture to performance and drawing. The exhibition Today is OK brings these languages together to experiment with an expanded form of cinema. Film, sets and sculptures rub against one another: the moving image escapes its frame and spills out into the exhibition space.
Press rlease from Palais de Tokyo
Image: Ali Cherri. La sentinelle. France. 2026. 29 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist © Last Dreams Production /Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains
