The best moment at any film festival is when the films themselves, like party guests whose initial shyness wears off after a couple of drinks, open up and begin to talk to each other. So it is with this year’s Cannes vintage, where a number of features have suddenly begun to pipe up about struggling children and their wayward parents.

In Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum a 12-year-old boy, Zain (played by Zain Alrafeea, in a standout performance), decides to sue his parents for bringing him into this world, after finding himself doing time for stabbing someone. The film explores the series of events leading up to his incarceration, showing how the child is asked to forsake school in order to help his struggling parents with their hand-to-mouth existence, selling cups of beetroot juice, dealing drugs to a cousin in prison and working part-time in a shop, before attempting to flee and start a new life elsewhere. Zain’s childhood has been interrupted: the responsibilities he is made to take on rob him of his innocence – he must be capable and strong, and in a sense look after his parents.

This theme is echoed in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, set in the States, where a girl named Tom is hiding from the law with her father, Will, a veteran with PTSD who cannot stand to live in society. Granik shows with great humanity how unbearable this situation becomes for Tom, who is deprived of a chance to go to school in order to help Will with their survivalist lifestyle in the woods. A rift between father and daughter begins to open up when they are made to integrate into normal society by the authorities.

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters features a pretend family, made up of two petty criminals and the children they have taken away from their birth parents. The boy, Shota, is taught to steal by his adoptive father, who wastes no time in trying to abandon him when the child is hospitalised. As with Leave No Trace and Capernaum, Shoplifters sees Shota needing to confront his parents and leave their clutches to have a chance at a normal life.

Why these particular parent figures, and why now? So many films here point to a splintering of the family, often under the pressure of globalisation; poverty, and the way it forces children to grow up fast, is a big theme at the festival this year. At the same time, their parent figures seem crushed by the weight of responsibility. This is the case in Agnieszka Smoczynska’s spiky family drama Fugue, where Kinga, a mother who abandoned her husband and son two years ago, is given a chance to reconnect with them. When she comes back to her family in her new identity as Alicia, she is brash, sexually confident and totally uninterested in playing the role of smiling wife and mother. If she is able to make a life without them, it’s because the world has started to grant her a chance at self-determination.

This sense of parents who need to escape the confines of their roles is there, too, in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning; a standout scene among many brilliant ones comes when the protagonist, Jongsu, briefly reconnects with the mother he barely knows. She is garishly dressed, signalling her rise in socially mobile South Korea from small-town wife to city-dwelling socialite, and is more interested in her mobile phone than in her son. Jongsu’s lack of role models is clearly one reason he feels so rudderless and ill at ease in a harsh, rapidly changing world.

If the children often seem abandoned by their parental figures, there is also a sense from films in Cannes that the traditional family itself is out of date, and that new families can be set up that take the place of parents. The central character in Alice Rohrwacher’s magical Happy As Lazzaro has grown up without knowing who his parents are – but in the film’s brilliant second half, we see how the disenfranchised people from his old village stick together in the city, creating something like a family who look after each other. The marginalised people of Granik’s Leave No Trace similarly protect one another. In Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s dazzling Diamantino, a sly look at the struggles of modern Portugal, the whole father-child dynamic is queered: Diamantino, a celebrity football star in the vein of Cristiano Ronaldo, feeling adrift after the death of his father, finds a touching kinship with a surrogate son figure (in fact a woman), which comes to fulfil his desperate need for love and guidance.

The modern world is terrifying in these films, which ask how we communicate in order to help each other get through even a single day. If the children are dispossessed and lacking in support, the movies also suggest that many have enough guile to make it, and show people still trying, against the odds, to pull through.