La Sentinelle follows a French soldier, Lafleur, over the course of France’s national holiday, as the weight of his military duty silently weighs down upon him. Presented at the 2026 edition of the Festival de Cannes, this new film by Ali Cherri with Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Eric Cantona stages the vestiges of a bygone era, fixed in a décor where words resonate like empty echoes. Between nocturnal escapades and fleeting encounters, in particular with a cabaret performer, Lafleur wanders between dream and reality.

Presented within a new installation devised specifically for the Palais de Tokyo, the film is extended through an exhibition where cinema escapes the screen to occupy the surrounding space. Decors, sculptures and installations extend the film’s questions around the figure of the guardian, mechanisms of preparing for conflict and the effects of war on bodies and imaginaries. Designed as artificial constructions close to theatre and to painting, the exhibition’s spaces blur the boundaries between the fictional and the real.

At the heart of the exhibition stands a monumental sculpture, inspired by military memorials, which subverts the codes of heroism to foreground the vulnerabilities of soldiers. Between architecture and stage sets, Ali Cherri explores the narratives that shape the experience of war and the forms of flight, resistance and abandon that they make possible.