By Sarah Johnson
Cannes is a lot. Honestly. It’s always just… a lot. Yachts, mostly, and people sweating in very expensive suits hoping someone important notices them standing there. But this year? The 79th one? Park Chan-wook was running the jury, which was a wild choice that actually worked out. We ended up getting some actual movies worth talking about.
Mungiu won the big one. The Palme d’Or. For Fjord. It’s his second time winning it, which makes sense because the guy just knows exactly how to make you feel terrible. He takes human misery and sort of… dissects it on a table. It’s incredibly bleak stuff. You watch it and you feel bad. Then it ends and you think, yeah, okay, that was basically a masterpiece.
Then there was Minotaur. Andrey Zvyagintsev. It won the Grand Prix. It’s huge. Like, physically exhausting to sit through because it’s so dense and political. A movie that big usually falls apart halfway through because it’s trying to do too much. This one didn’t.
Best Director was a tie, which is always annoying. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi won for The Black Ball (La Bola Negra). It’s this crazy pop-culture explosion of a movie. And they tied with Paweł Pawlikowski. For Fatherland. Which is, as you’d expect, incredibly sad and Polish. Putting those two next to each other on a list is hilarious. But that’s Cannes.
Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto both won Best Actress. For All Of A Sudden. Usually sharing an award feels like the jury just couldn’t make a decision, but here it worked. You literally can’t pull their performances apart. They’re too tangled up in each other. Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagneshare won Best Actor. For Coward.
Valeska Grisebach won the Jury Prize. The Dreamed Adventure. It’s super quiet. It sneaks up behind you. Emmanuel Marre won Best Screenplay for A Man Of His Time (Notre Salut). Meanest dialogue of the whole festival, hands down. And Clémentine Dusabejambo won the Camera d’Or for Ben’Imana, which is nice because it shows someone is actually paying attention to the new directors instead of just the red carpet.
They gave Honorary Palmes to Peter Jackson, John Travolta, and Barbra Streisand. Make of that what you will. Just a bunch of random Hollywood people getting clapped for.
Anyway. 2026 wasn’t a total waste of time. Underneath all the ridiculous fashion, there were actually some good movies. You just had to look for them.