There is something quietly fitting about a film built around the fear of forgetting arriving in a city that has spent decades making memory its business. Cannes knows how to receive a film. The palm-lined Croisette, the ritual of the red carpet, the particular hush before a projection begins — all of it belongs to a place that understands cinema not as entertainment but as event. On Sunday 30 August 2026 at 16:30, that instinct travels a few kilometres west along the coast, to Cineum Cannes in La Bocca, where an avant-première of the new DreamWorks Animation feature will take place ahead of its general release.
The film is called L'île des souvenirs in French — Forgotten Island in its original English title. Running 1 hour 38 minutes, it is directed by Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado. Crawford is known to animation audiences for The Croods: A New Age; Mercado, a Filipino-American filmmaker, brings a personal cultural register to the project. The story follows Jo and Raissa, two best friends since primary school, who are swept away to the fantastical island of Nakali — a world populated by creatures drawn from Philippine mythology — immediately after sitting their baccalauréat. To find their way home, they must confront the Manananggal, one of the most formidable figures in Filipino folklore, all while racing against a peculiar and melancholy threat: the island itself is erasing their shared memories.
Mythology as Landscape
Philippine folklore has rarely been given this kind of platform. The Manananggal — a winged, self-segmenting creature that haunts the night — belongs to a tradition of Visayan myth that has circulated in oral culture for centuries but has seldom crossed into mainstream Western animation. Its appearance here, produced under the DreamWorks banner, marks a meaningful shift in whose stories the genre chooses to tell. The island of Nakali is fictional, but the imaginative world it draws from is specific and deeply rooted: a cosmology of aswang, engkanto, and nature spirits that reflects the archipelago's layered history of indigenous belief, Spanish colonialism, and cultural resilience.
For families attending the screening at Cineum Cannes, the film offers something rarer than spectacle: a story whose emotional architecture — friendship, the passage from adolescence into adulthood, the anxiety that growing up means growing apart — is legible across cultures, even as its visual vocabulary is refreshingly unfamiliar.
The Venue, the Afternoon, the Occasion
Cineum Cannes sits at 13 avenue Maurice Chevalier in the La Bocca quarter, a short drive from the city centre along the bay. The multiplex is the largest cinema complex on the Côte d'Azur, and it serves as the primary venue for Cannes's year-round cultural programming beyond the May festival. An avant-première here carries a specific weight: it is a proper screening occasion, not a marketing preview.
The 16:30 slot on a Sunday at the end of August places the event at a particular inflection point in the Riviera calendar — the last long weekend before the summer disperses, when families are still gathered and the light over the Lérins islands still holds its warmth well into the evening. It is a good afternoon to sit in the dark together and watch two young women navigate a world that wants to make them forget each other.
'Before the island erases everything' — the film's central tension turns forgetting into something almost physical, a landscape that actively works against memory.
Ticketing and admission conditions were not confirmed at the time of publication; prospective attendees should consult the official Cannes agenda at the address listed below for current information. What is confirmed is the date, the time, and the film itself — a DreamWorks Animation feature rooted in Filipino mythology, arriving on the Côte d'Azur one late-summer Sunday before most of the world has seen it. Some screenings are worth planning a day around. This one has the shape of exactly that.