The 75th Cannes Film Festival concluded on Saturday with the announcement of all the much-awaited awards for outstanding films under different categories, including its highest honour, the Palme d’Or.
Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s class-warfare comedy, Triangle of Sadness won the Palme d’Or, one of cinema’s most prestigious prizes. Incidentally, this is the second time Ruben won the Palme d’Or, pulling off the rare feat of winning Cannes’ top award for back-to-back films. His art-world send-up, The Square took the Palme in 2017.
The awards were selected by a nine-member jury headed by French actor Vincent Lindon and presented on Saturday in a closing ceremony at Cannes’ Grand Lumière Theatre.
Grand Prix: The jury’s second prize, the Grand Prix, was shared between the Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s tender boyhood drama, Close (about two 13-year-old boys whose bond is tragically separated after their intimacy is mocked by schoolmates), and French filmmaking legend Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon, a Denis Johnson adaptation starring Margaret Qualley as a journalist in Central America’s Nicaragua.
Best Director: The directing prize went to South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (of Oldboy and The Handmaiden fame) for his twisty noir Decision to Leave, a romance fused with a police procedural.
Best Actor: Korean star Song Kang Ho was named best actor for his performance in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film Broker, about a Korean family seeking a home for an abandoned baby. Song also starred in Bong Joon Ho’s award-winning film Parasite, which bagged the Palme d’Or in 2019.
Best Actress: The best actress went to Zar Amir Ebrahimi for her performance as a journalist in Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, a true-crime thriller about a serial killer targeting sex workers in the Iranian religious city of Mashhad. Violent and graphic, Holy Spider wasn’t permitted to shoot in Iran and was instead made in Jordan. Accepting the award, Ebrahimi said the film depicts “everything that’s impossible to show in Iran (sic).”
Golden Eye for Best Documentary: Indian filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes, which previously won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, has now won the top documentary award, the Golden Eye.
Best Short Film: The Water Murmurs by Chinese director Chen Jianying won the best short film at Cannes this year.
Best Screenplay: Swedish-Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh took the best screenplay award at Cannes for Boy From Heaven, a thriller set in Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque.
Jury Prize: The jury prize was split between the friendship tale The Eight Mountains by Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix Van Groeningen, and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, which is about a donkey’s journey across a pitiless modern Europe.
Camera d’Or for Best First Film: The award for the best first film, the Camera d’Or, went to Riley Keough and Gina Gammell for War Pony, a drama about the Pine Ridge Reservation made in collaboration with Oglala Lakota and Sicangu Lakota citizens.
The jury also awarded a special award for the 75th Cannes to two-time Palme winners and Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for their immigrant drama, Tori and Lokita.
Saturday’s closing ceremony brought to a close a film fest that unfolded against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, which sparked red-carpet protests and dialogue about the purpose of cinema during war.
Last year, the French body horror thriller, Titane took the top prize at Cannes, making director Julia Decournau only the second female filmmaker ever to win the Palme.
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