Cannes 2026 Award Winners

By Pickle May 24, 2026

By Saibal Chatterjee

The jury chaired by Park Chan-wook sprang no major surprises at the awards ceremony of the 79th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. The evening played out largely along expected lines, except when the recipient of the top prize – th Palme d’Or – was revealed.

A mix of established auteurs and a handful of promising first-time filmmakers dominated the awards.

The Palme d’Or, announced by Tilda Swinton, was won by Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, making it the Romanian director’s second top prize at the festival.

Fjord, set in Norway where a Romanian-Norwegian couple struggle with stringent child protection laws, is the first film Mungiu has made outside his country

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s corrosive Minotaur won the Grand Prix. It was regarded as a strong contender for the Palme d’Or.

A perfect murder drama in the guise of a trenchant commentary on moral degeneration in Russia in the early months of the Ukraine war, Minotaur is Zvyagintsev’ first film in nearly a decade.

For Zyavingtsev, this is a three-in-three. He won awards in Cannes with his previous two films – Best screenplay for Leviathan (2014) and Jury Prize for Loveless (2017).

The Dreamed Adventure, directed by German filmmaker Valeska Grisebach, bagged the Jury Prize.The award was presented by Gael Garcia Bernal.

The best screenplay award was scooped by French writer-director Emmanuel Marre for his period film, Notre Salut (A Man of his Time).

The best director award was shared by Pawel Pawlikowski for Fatherland and Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi for La Bola Negra (The Black Ball), both ambitious, magnificently crafted period films.

Virginia Efira and Tao Okamoto were adjudged joint winners of the best actress prize for their performances in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Soudain (All of a Sudden) as a director of a Parisian nursing home and a cancer-stricken theatre director respectively.

The best actor prize, presented by Geena Davis, one half of the duo featured on the festival’s official poster designed as a tribute to Thelma and Louise, was jointly won by the stars of Lukas Dhont’s Coward, debutante Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne.

Two nations featuring in Cannes Un certain regard forvthe first time – Rwanda and Nepal – made it to the awards roster.

The Camera d’Or for the best directorial debut, announced by jury chief Monia Chokri, went to Marie-Clementine Dusbejambo’s Ben’Imana, about a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi people.

It is the first-ever film directed by a Rwandan to be selected for the Cannes official selection.

On the penultimate day of the festival, in a first of epic proportions, the only Nepali feature film ever in Un certain regard, Abinash Bikram Shah’s Elephants in the Fog, won a Jury Prize.

From the moment Elephants in the Fog premiered, it generated a huge buzz and was tipped as one of the frontrunners, a major triumph for cinema from Nepal.

Elephants in the Fog was beaten to the Un certain Regard Prize by Austrian director Sandra Wollner’s Everytime.