5 Cannes 2025 Films That Ask: What If Business Wasn’t Just About Profit?

A surprising undercurrent stirred beneath the surface at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where luxury sponsors and legacy studios often dominate the conversation. In a world where business has increasingly become about profile, personal brands, shareholder value, and optics, a few daring films flipped the script.

These five standout entries from Cannes 2025 challenged a prevailing assumption of our age: that success must be seen to matter. With unique cultural perspectives, bold aesthetics, and emotional intelligence, they asked a more urgent question:

What if business wasn’t just about profit, but about purpose, people, and presence?

1. Sentimental Value

Director: Joachim Trier | Country: Norway

In Sentimental Value, Trier offers a tender, sharp-eyed critique of legacy and commerce through the lens of a middle-aged auctioneer who inherits a warehouse full of unsold personal artifacts from failed startups. As he begins to catalog what’s left behind, he discovers objects with profound emotional significance—discarded in the race for relevance.

Trier uses silence, memory, and nostalgia as counterweights to modern business’s obsession with visibility. The film asks: What happens to the parts of us that can’t be monetized?

2. Sirat

Director: Oliver Laxe | Country: Spain/Morocco

In this meditative, sun-scorched road film, Laxe follows a nomadic artisan crossing the High Atlas Mountains, selling handwoven rugs in a world overtaken by mass production. As corporate investors arrive in his remote village to “scale” the craft into a global brand, the protagonist must choose between profit and principle.

Sirat is a minimalist fable about cultural integrity in the age of commodification. It’s a spiritual rebellion against the idea that scale equals success.

3. Eleanor the Great

Director: Scarlett Johansson | Country: USA

In her surprising directorial debut, Johansson presents a warm, funny, and subversive portrait of an aging ex-CEO who reinvents herself as a community theater producer in a small town. Eleanor the Great is a satire of corporate rebranding and a sincere homage to second chances.

As Eleanor lets go of her carefully cultivated profile, she finds a deeper, messier form of leadership rooted in vulnerability, not visibility.

4. Nouvelle Vague

Director: Richard Linklater | Country: USA/France

Linklater’s playful, time-skipping ensemble piece follows a group of young creatives in Paris who launch an “anti-startup”—a cooperative production house with no logo, no online presence, and no ambition to scale. Ironically, their underground approach attracts global attention.

Nouvelle Vague is a love letter to resistance, capturing the tension between authenticity and aspiration in today’s hyper-curated creative economy. It’s also a wink to the past—borrowing its name and attitude from the French New Wave.

5. The History of Sound

Director: Oliver Hermanus | Country: UK/USA

Hermanus returns with a sweeping, sensual drama about two young men who travel the American countryside recording voices and stories for the U.S. government during World War I. Though not about business in the traditional sense, The History of Sound is a profound meditation on value—what we choose to preserve and let disappear.

This film is a haunting reminder in an era where content is created to vanish within seconds: meaning doesn’t always come from momentum.

A New Ethic in the Spotlight

These five films don’t reject business—they reclaim it. Not as a ladder to visibility, but as a vessel for values. Not as a platform for personality, but as a force for connection.

At Cannes 2025, the loudest message wasn’t shouted—it was whispered through stories of smallness, slowness, and sincerity.

What if business wasn’t just about profit?

This year, cinema answered: Maybe it would finally be about people.

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