Leos Carax's Seventh Feature 'Lily May B' Starring Jenna Ortega Sets Spring 2027 Production Start

One of the most anticipated auteur projects to emerge from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival is now officially moving toward cameras. Leos Carax, the visionary French filmmaker behind some of the most singular and celebrated films of the past four decades, is heading into production on his seventh feature, Lily May B, with Jenna Ortega attached to lead as the titular character. Principal photography is scheduled to begin in Spring 2027, giving crew and creative collaborators a meaningful runway to get in front of this production now, while key positions are still being shaped.

Carax is one of the most distinctive and demanding voices in world cinema. His filmography is sparse by design and towering in reputation: Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang, The Lovers on the Bridge, Pola X, Holy Motors, and most recently Annette, the 2021 Cannes Best Director prize winner and his first English-language feature, which starred Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. Each Carax film is a world unto itself, typically built around a fiercely original visual language, intensely physical performance, and a production design sensibility that is nothing short of obsessive. Working on a Carax film is not a conventional assignment. It is, for the right crew members, a career-defining one. Lily May B is described as a dystopian road movie following three young characters, a girl, a young woman, and a boy, each carrying secrets as they traverse a post-apocalyptic landscape of empty cities, deserted highways, and ancient forests. The full ensemble cast beyond Ortega is expected to be announced in September 2026.

Ortega's attachment is a significant commercial anchor for what is otherwise a deeply unconventional project. Fresh off the global success of Wednesday and a string of high-profile genre projects including Scream and its sequels, Ortega has established herself as one of the most in-demand young performers working today. Her willingness to take on a Carax film signals serious artistic ambition and will almost certainly raise the production's international profile considerably. The combination of Carax's auteur credibility and Ortega's marketability makes Lily May B a genuinely unusual proposition: a film that is likely to attract serious festival attention while also carrying real commercial heat.

The production is being overseen by producer Hugo Sélignac at Chi-Fou-Mi Productions, a company operating under the Mediawan umbrella. Sélignac is a seasoned French producer whose recent credits include Beating Hearts (Les Amandiers) directed by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and All Your Faces, and he brings both the European art-cinema relationships and the structural production infrastructure that a project of this complexity will require. Mediawan, the Paris-based media group co-founded by Xavier Niel, Matthieu Pigasse, and Pierre-Antoine Capton, has grown aggressively into premium content production and has the scale and international distribution relationships to support a prestige feature of this ambition. This is not a shoestring art-house production. The Mediawan backing, Ortega's name, and Carax's stature collectively signal a well-financed, internationally positioned feature.

Filming locations have not yet been officially confirmed, which is not unusual for a production still a year out from its start date. Given Carax's working history, which has been centered almost entirely in France and Western Europe, and the film's description of sweeping, varied post-apocalyptic environments including cities, highways, and forests, it would be reasonable to expect a significant European location shoot, potentially across multiple countries. Productions in this vein, wide-ranging geographically and visually ambitious, tend to require a strong locations department, an expansive art department capable of transforming real environments to read as desolate and end-of-world, and a cinematography team fluent in large-scale exterior work. Carax has historically collaborated with DP Yves Cape on several projects, though no cinematographer has been confirmed for Lily May B at this stage.

From a crew perspective, this production is worth watching closely right now even with filming more than a year away. Carax productions are known for extended, meticulous pre-production processes, and department heads on projects of this visual scale are typically identified and engaged well in advance of cameras rolling. The production design demands alone, recreating or finding locations that convincingly read as post-civilizational landscapes across varied terrain types, suggest a substantial art department build-up beginning many months before the Spring 2027 start. The road-movie format and apocalyptic setting also point toward a robust locations department, significant costume and wardrobe work establishing each character's arc through visual storytelling, and likely a meaningful VFX component to augment practical environments. Given the production's European roots and the involvement of a French production company, a mixed French and international crew composition is probable, with key creative positions likely being filled in late 2026 following the September cast announcement.

The full production listing for Lily May B is available now on ProductionList.com, where you can track crew attachments, production office details, and scheduling updates as they are confirmed. With the September 2026 cast announcement expected to accelerate the staffing timeline considerably, this is the moment to get familiar with the project and position yourself accordingly. Check the listing, bookmark it, and watch for updates as this one develops into what is shaping up to be one of the most significant art-cinema productions of 2027.

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