While Paris burned and millions of French workers walked off the job, the film world's most glamorous event continued with champagne receptions and yacht parties. The contrast was obscene. In an act of solidarity with striking students and workers, the directors who had revolutionized cinema rushed the stage of the Palais des Festivals. Carlos Saura grabbed the curtains to prevent them from opening. Fistfights erupted. Godard lost his glasses. Within hours, the festival was cancelled—the only time in its history outside of World War II.

This wasn't just a protest. It was the moment when French cinema's aesthetic revolution collided head-on with political upheaval, forcing filmmakers to ask an impossible question: In revolutionary times, does art matter?

From the Langlois Affair to Costa-Gavras's Z, from Godard's Dziga Vertov Group to the birth of Directors' Fortnight, discover how May '68 changed cinema forever—and why the filmmakers who built the barricades could never agree on what came next.

In 1950s Paris, a group of passionate young film critics plotted a revolution with nothing but notebooks, cheap cameras, and an audacious idea: that cinema could be written like literature. From Agnès Varda's pioneering La Pointe Courte to Godard's anarchic Breathless and Truffaut's autobiographical The 400 Blows, the French New Wave transformed the camera into a pen. It proved that personal vision mattered more than studio budgets, that breaking rules could create new languages, and that the most powerful films come from filmmakers who love cinema enough to reinvent it completely.