Winners and Losers of Cannes 2026

After ten days of screenings in which more than a third of the competition entries focused on stories of queer identity and persecution, the jury of this year’s Cannes Film Festival surprisingly awarded its top prize, the Palme d’Or, to Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, a drama about a conservative religious family from Romania fighting child abuse charges in a Norwegian legal system of intolerant progressives.

Mungiu, who previously won the Palme d’Or in 2007 for his scathing communist-era Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, took the stage at the Grand Théâtre Lumière amid wild applause and cheers of “Bravo!” from the audience. “I’m happy that you gave us this award,” he said. “Mostly because there’s always a risk to speak aloud about things that many of us know, many of us share, but don’t dare to say in public.”

The film, which stars Sebastian Stan and Renata Reinsve, was a hot-button topic this week among the journalists who wondered whether more liberal audiences (especially in America and Europe) would embrace a less-than-flattering portrayal of secular values and governmental intrusion into the private lives of its citizens. Neon will release Fjord in the U.S. this fall — amazingly, it’s the seventh consecutive time that the distributor has domestic rights to the Palme d’Or winner. That streak, which includes eventual Best Picture Oscar winners Parasite and Anora, instantly catapults Fjord into this year’s Academy Awards chatter.

The Cannes jury, which was headed this year by director Park Chan-wook and included Demi Moore, Chloé Zhao, and Stellen Skarsgård, focused on recognizing more overtly political dramas that addressed the past century of European upheaval, included both World Wars, and even touched on ongoing modern-day conflicts. They gave its second-prize Grand Prix to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, a brutal indictment of amoral power structures in Putin’s Russia that remakes Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle amid the backdrop of soldier recruitment for the war in Ukraine.

Best Director was a tie between Pawel Pawlikowski for Fatherland, about acclaimed novelist Thomas Mann’s 1949 tour of a devastated postwar Germany; and Javier Calva and Javier Ambrossi (affectionately known as Los Javis) for The Black Ball, a fascinating and ambitious epic about the gay experience in Spain that toggles between the 1930s and 2010s in its exploration of a lost play by Federico Garcia Lorca. Netflix nabbed The Black Ball for $5 million, wagering that its virtuosic filmmaking and starry cameos — including Glenn Close as a literary scholar and Penelope Cruz as a sultry wartime chanteuse — will be awards catnip this fall.

The third-place jury prize went to Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure, a critically well-received experimental crime drama with documentary underpinnings that played on the last day of the festival. Emmanuel Marre’s A Man of His Time, an overlong but clear-eyed indictment of the director’s own grandfather and his role as a spineless middle-management bureaucrat overseeing the gradual deportation of Jews in Vichy France, won Best Screenplay.

The acting prizes were both given to pairs of co-stars. Best Actor was awarded to Valentin Campagne and Emmanuel Macchia as two soldiers secretly falling in love while fighting in the trenches of World War I in Lukas Dhont’s Coward. And Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared Best Actress for their remarkably tender and intense friendship in All of a Sudden, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour examination of France’s nursing home system.

Surprising a few Cannes prognosticators, the jury did not recognize any of the actors in James Gray’s star-studded genre-inflected ’80s family drama Paper Tiger, which featured Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson; nor did they reward Rami Malek for his critically beloved role as an underground ’80s New York theater performer dying of AIDS in Ira Sach’s The Man I Love. Both films, which will come out this fall, are expected to do better during awards season in the U.S.

As usual, the award-winning films at Cannes highlight stories of intolerance and prejudice as much as they celebrate artistic innovation and virtuosity. And in his remarks accepting the Palme d’Or, Mungiu stressed his craft’s enduring power to show the world with compassion. “I think it’s important in cinema to speak about relevant things,” he said. “I think that the relevant things are right next to us. I think that there are ways in which you can understand the direction in which the world is going, simply by observing what happens to people close to you.” He ended with a plea that is a constant refrain in all his works. “Tolerance, inclusion, empathy,” said Mungiu. “These are lovely words, and we need to apply them more often.”