The Female-Centric Winners Of Cannes

The future is female at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where a jury headed by Greta Gerwig celebrated stories about women—along with a few female filmmakers—during the event’s closing ceremony last weekend. And, out of a competition lineup boasting somber international works of human drama occasionally tainted with overt politicism, the main prize went to: an American comedy. 

Anora, Sean Baker’s wildly entertaining, oversexed Cinderella-hooker-with-Russian-oligarchs romance won the Palme d’Or, a delightful surprise considering that Baker had only been in competition once before, with 2021’s equally randy Red Rocket. “You’re a winner!” said George Lucas, on hand to collect an honorary Palme d’Or himself, and tasked with handing out this year’s competitive Palme to Baker. A starstruck Baker bent a knee and bowed to the Star Wars auteur. “You’re why I make movies,” he confided to Lucas off-mic before approaching the podium. 

That effusive comment might have puzzled the billionaire sci-fi fantasy mythmaker, since almost all of Baker’s modestly budgeted films, including Anora, are giddy-but-grounded, heartbreaking and heartfelt explorations of sex work on the fringes of society. “I’m shaken,” said Baker. “I’m still in disbelief that you invited our little baby to the ball.” 

 But the two directors share a common passion for the theatrical experience. “Right now, as filmmakers, we have to fight to keep cinema alive—and that means making feature films intended for theatrical exhibition,” said Baker to wild applause from the 2,000 attendees at the festival’s Lumière Theater. “Watching a film with others in a move theater is one of the great communal experiences. We share laughter, sorrow, anger, and fear, with friends and strangers. And that’s sacred. The future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theater.” 

Anora, the first U.S. film to win the Palme since Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life in 2011, is also the fifth consecutive Palme d’Or winner that distributor Neon, a staunch believer in theatrical exhibition, will be bringing back to North America. A Fall awards-season release is in the cards for the boisterous Anora, the kind of broadly appealing wide-screen experience with a strong chance at crossover appeal. “This isn’t exactly a mainstream movie,” Baker admitted. “But hopefully this wonderful win will help get it into multiplexes and remind mainstream audiences that these films still exist.” 

Another unlikely prizewinner that will do nicely later this year in American multiplexes—at least among the gross-out genre lovers—is The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s blood-spewing, flesh-rending feminist body-horror freakout starring Demi Moore. Jury member Eva Green called it a “bold, beautifully bonkers” film before awarding it Best Screenplay. She’s not wrong, considering how the darkly comic vision plays more like a fractured fairy tale, where an aging former movie star (Moore) finds a biotech fix that bifurcates her body into two separate people. Cue Margaret Qualley crawling out of her back, and slowly sucking more and more life out of Moore.

One of the biggest Cannes crowd-pleasers was another femme-centric fable which ended up nabbing two awards. Emilia Perez, a Spanish-language trans musical from electrically eclectic French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, co-stars Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, and features Karla Sofía Gascón as a violent Mexican drug lord who desperately desires a sex change. The audacious melodrama, an Almodòvarian tale of passion, betrayal, and sacrifice, got the Best Actress award for what juror Lily Gladstone called the film’s harmony of sisterhood. “How can you award harmony by singling out individual notes?” she said. “They’re stronger when they resound together.” Netflix picked up North American rights for $8 million, by far the biggest deal out of this year’s Cannes.

The second-place Grand Prize went to All We Imagine As Light, a gentle, quietly touching film from India about a trio of women who work together in a Mumbai hospital, their role in Indian society, and the longing they harbor for the compromised men in their lives. Filmmaker Payal Kapadia echoes Wong Kar-Wai and Satyajit Ray while carving out her own distinct voice in this portrait of a forlorn sisterhood—the first Indian film in 30 years to compete for the Palme d’Or, a fact Kapadia made sure to bring up in her acceptance speech. “Please don’t wait 30 years to have another Indian film,” she said.

Most overtly political prize went to Mohammad Rasoulof’s devastating Iranian drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which was given a nondescript but well-deserved Special Award. Rasoulof, a dissident filmmaker just recently sentenced to flogging and 8 years in prison, dramatically fled his country just as Cannes began two weeks ago, and appeared at the festival under much risk to his life and those of his loved ones back in Iran. 

Sacred Fig details the harrowing events of a recently promoted investigative judge whose new position within the harshly conservative Tehran courts coincides with an outbreak of feminist protests. The job, which requires him to carry a gun for self-protection, brings intense pressure not only on him, but on his wife and two daughters who struggle to support him—even as he becomes more dangerous and dogmatic. 

“The Iranian people have been taken hostage by the regime of the Islamic Republic,” said Rasoulof during his acceptance speech, and pointed to civil unrest as the only way to affect change in his home country. His film’s final image—no spoilers, I promise!—is nonetheless a metaphor for a patriarchy collapsed under its own weight, surrounded by traumatized women who will inevitably inherit the world left behind.