“Fjord,” Cristian Mungiu’s drama about a Romanian family that is targeted by child services in Norway, won the Palme d’Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. It was a second Palme for Mungiu, who took the prize in 2007 for “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.”
The jury president, Park Chan-wook, said he had spent the past two weeks discussing “films by diverse personalities alongside jurors with diverse personalities,” and that “this double layer of diversity” had brought him happiness. “Fjord,” he said, shed light on the issue of “respecting the diversities of the world in an artistically magnificent manner.”
Accepting the award, Mungiu alluded to his past experience winning and his time serving on the Cannes jury under Steven Spielberg in 2013. “All awards are contextual, and the fact that you gave me this award, it’s wonderful for us,” he said. “We feel very happy. But we need to wait 10, 20 years to watch these films again, and then we’ll understand which of them was really good and managed to survive the test of time.”
He added: “Today, the society is split—it’s divided, it’s radicalized. And if you want, this film is a pledge against any kind of fundamentalism.” He made reference to “tolerance, inclusion and empathy”: “These are lovely words, and we’re used to lovely words,” he said, “but we need to apply them more often.”
In the United States, “Fjord” will be the seventh consecutive Palme d’Or winner to be distributed by Neon.
The Grand Prix, or second place, went to “Minotaur,” the director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s transposition of the Claude Chabrol drama “La Femme Infidèle” (1969) to Russia near the start of the country’s invasion of Ukraine. (Latvia stood in for Russian locations.)
The Jury Prize, a third-place award of sorts that often to goes to bold, risk-taking work, went to the German director Valeska Grisebach’s “The Dreamed Adventure,” the story of a Bulgarian archeologist navigating her gangster-run hometown. Grisebach spoke of filming in the region and admiring the empathy and tenderness of its residents.
Best Director was a split between the Spanish directing team Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (“The Black Ball”) and Pawel Pawlikowski for “Fatherland,” a critics’ favorite about the author Thomas Mann’s return to Germany in 1949.
Another critics’ favorite, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden,” took a joint best-actress prize for Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, who spend much of the film acting in the other’s native language. “Thank you so much for recognizing us as a pair,” Okamoto said. The two actresses appeared overwhelmed and still seemed to be finishing each other’s sentences.
Best Actor was another tie, between Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, who in Lukas Dhont’s “Coward” play soldiers who begin a love affair while fighting in World War I. It was a festival with many war films: The director Emmanuel Marre won the screenplay prize for “A Man of His Time,” which depicts his great-grandfather, Henri Marre, as a Vichy-era opportunist.
The Camera d’Or, for best first feature, went to Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo for “Ben’Imana,” which dramatizes the complexity of societal and interpersonal reconciliation in Rwanda.
