Ron Howard’s Richard Avedon Documentary to Premiere at Cannes Film Festival

Acclaimed director Ron Howard will premiere his documentary AVEDON about famed photographer Richard Avedon at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The 79th Cannes Film Festival begins today (May 12) on the French Riviera and will run for 12 days, featuring a slate of international film premieres. The event will conclude on May 23 with the presentation of the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest award and one of the most prestigious honors in global cinema.

Howard’s documentary AVEDON will be presented as a special screening as part of the festival’s 2026 Official Selection. Produced by Imagine Documentaries, the documentary explores the life and legacy of Richard Avedon, the influential photographer whose work helped shape modern fashion and portrait photography. Avedon’s images played a major role in defining American ideas of style, beauty, and culture over several decades until his death in 2004.

AVEDON draws from unprecedented access access to Avedon’s personal archives, including previously unseen photographs, behind-the-scenes footage, and new interviews with close collaborators. Over 104 minutes, it examines how Avedon used photography not only to document the 20th century but also to help define how it was seen.

Howard — who directed films like A Beautiful Mind and Rush — says that he was struck by how Avedon’s work spanned decades, capturing major cultural shifts from post-World War II optimism and 1950s celebrity culture through to the civil rights and Vietnam eras — showing how photography reflected a rapidly changing America.

“It was stunning to see just how much he accomplished in both of these areas and how many decades he spanned. I was struck by images that were about the resurgence of culture coming out of World War II, which is when he rose to fame as a young photographer,” Howard tells PEOPLE in an interview about the documentary. “It was that post-Depression, post-World War II rediscovery of beauty and design and popular culture in that way. And then he was right in the middle of the Madmen 50s era, Marilyn Monroe and Louis Armstrong and those kinds of celebrities, to go with all the covers for Harper’s Bazaar that he was beginning to do.”

“But then he kept going, and then in the 60s, he was not only doing pop art and cool commercial stuff, but he started doing the civil liberties and the civil rights movement and the Vietnam and the revolution, and that just kept going,” Howard adds. “So I began to realize that in a way, you’re getting to look at culture and how it’s impacted by images throughout very tumultuous and fascinating periods of culture.”