Lukas Dhont's Cannes Entry 'Coward' and the Gendered Politics of World War One Imagery

When Lukas Dhont arrived at the Cannes Film Festival press conference for his latest feature, he brought a single photograph that reframed a century of cinematic assumptions about how wars should be shown. The image, dating from the First World War, depicted soldiers manning sandbag barricades while wearing skirts rather than trousers—a practical adaptation to conditions in waterlogged trenches that has been almost entirely erased from visual memory. Dhont, whose 2018 debut "Girl" earned a Cannes Grand Prix nomination and made him one of Belgian cinema's most internationally recognised voices, placed that photograph at the centre of his argument about what 'Coward' is attempting.

Speaking to reporters on 22 May 2026, Dhont explained that mainstream war cinema has converged on a single aesthetic vocabulary: mud, blood, fire, and a particular kind of heroic masculinity that the conflict supposedly demanded. "The photograph shows something different," he said, according to Reuters. "A group of men adapting to impossible circumstances, wearing what we have culturally assigned to women, and doing so without apparent shame or self-consciousness. That ambiguity is what we wanted to explore."

The film, which received a gala premiere slot at Cannes, follows a young Belgian soldier navigating trench conditions alongside his unit. Dhont has been deliberate about not disclosing the precise plot mechanics, but early reviews from festival correspondents describe a work that withholds the conventional catharsis audiences have been trained to expect from the war genre. No triumphant last stands. No consolatory deathbed letters. Instead, the camera lingers on the texture of waiting, the texture of clothing, and the moments when the performance of masculinity that war demands begins to fracture.

What makes the sandbag skirt photograph significant is not simply its rarity but what it exposes about selective historical memory. Historians studying material culture of the Western Front have documented that trench flooding was a persistent operational problem—soldiers routinely adapted their kit to conditions that standard-issue uniforms addressed inadequately. Kilts, skirts, and improvised long Unterhosen were more common than any surviving Hollywood production has suggested. Yet the visual archive of the First World War that circulated in the interwar period and was subsequently institutionalised through documentary photography, war museums, and cinema constructed a highly specific masculinity as the conflict's defining characteristic. Women and civilian men wore skirts; soldiers wore trousers. That boundary, the photograph suggests, was far more porous than the canonical images admit.

Dhont is not the first filmmaker to probe this gap. Ken Loach's body of work, particularly "Land and Freedom" and portions of his earlier social realist catalogue, has long interrogated the class dimensions of which soldiers get memorialised and how. But Dhont's approach is distinct in its refusal to make this a political argument delivered through dialogue. Instead, 'Coward' positions the body's relationship to clothing as its primary narrative engine. The skirt in the photograph is not a costume; it is a material response to a material problem. The film's task is to make that ordinariness visible again.

For a director whose previous work focused on adolescent identity and the social management of bodies—'Girl' dealt with a transgender teenager's experience in a ballet academy—the shift to military setting represents a thematic expansion rather than a departure. Both films investigate the pressure that external institutions place on physical selfhood and the strategies of survival that individuals develop under that pressure. The trench, in this reading, is not so different from the ballet school: a space where the body's expressive possibilities are simultaneously demanded and severely constrained.

The critical question Cannes press screenings have generated is whether 'Coward' can sustain its formal restraint without alienating audiences conditioned to expect escalating stakes from war cinema. Dhont's defenders at the festival argue that the film's refusal of spectacle is precisely its argument—that treating war as a sequence of dramatic peaks is itself a ideological act, one that flattens the lived experience of millions of men who spent their time waiting, soiling themselves in flooded trenches, and trying not to think about the next hour. The counter-reading is that European art cinema's tendency toward austerity can become its own form of privilege, a film made primarily for festival audiences rather than for the broader public whose ancestors served.

That tension is unlikely to resolve before the film reaches theatrical distribution. Dhont has indicated that he intends to refuse conventional festival awards campaigning, a decision that aligns with the film's deliberately anti-heroic posture. Whether that stance reads as integrity or as a form of festival privilege depends, in no small part, on who is watching and what they bring to the screening.

The sandbag skirt photograph itself remains a useful object for thinking beyond this particular film. It demonstrates how visual conventions govern not only how wars are depicted but which aspects of wars survive in public memory. The standard archive presents clean binaries: male/female, soldier/civilian, heroic/vulnerable. The photograph blurs all three. Dhont's achievement with 'Coward' is to build a feature-length work around a single archival crack in that edifice, trusting the audience to follow where it leads. Whether they follow is a question the Cannes run will begin to answer this week.

This publication covered Dhont's Cannes premiere in the culture desk's festival coverage lane, foregrounding the archival photograph as both aesthetic and historiographical provocation. Wire coverage tended to emphasise the film's Cannes positioning and Dhont's prior awards record.