The Cannes Film Festival handed out its awards today, wrapping up the annual festival with the usual distribution of mantle-destined metal. That included sending the fabled Palme d’Or home with Christian Mungiu’s Fjord, which stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a married couple who become embroiled in a massive scandal after moving to a small Norwegian village. The film is, among other things, Romanian director Mungiu’s second Palme win; he previously took home The Big Fancy Leaf back in 2007, for his film 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days.
Elsewhere in the competition, the second-place Grand Prize went to Andreï Zviaguintsev’s Minotaur, a thriller about a small-town businessman (Dmitriy Mazurov) who discovers his wife is having an affair. Other categories, meanwhile, showed the Cannes jury in a slightly indecisive mood: Best Director, for instance, was a tie, going to both Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi for their film La Bola Negro, as well as Paweł Pawlikowski for his Thomas Mann biopic Fatherland. (In an interview, Jury President Park Chan-wook was bluntly straightforward about the reasons for the splits: “We couldn’t decide whether one was better than the other.” In that sense, we guess we should be grateful that Park and his jury were more decisive on the Palme, maintaining their Fjord focus.)
That split mindset also extended to both acting categories, where the Jury picked two performances each from two films: Virginie Efira and Tao Okamo both winning Best Actress for Japanese drama All Of A Sudden, while Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagneshare shared Best Actor for Lukas Dhont’s World War I drama Coward. (Jury member Chloé Zhao offered slightly more explanation than Park for the splits, noting that, “We fell in love, not just with the actors, but the relationships of love and tenderness between them, we fell in love with awarding both of them.”)
Slightly more decisively, the jury handed out its Best Screenplay award to Emmanuelle Marre for French World War II drama A Man Of His Time, the Jury Prize (functionally third place) to Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure, and gave the Camera d’Or (awarded to the best first film at the competition) to director Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo’s Rwanda-set drama Ben’Imana. The jury also awarded the prize for best short film competing at the festival to Federico Luis, for his boxing-focused short film For The Opponents.
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