A second Palme for Mungiu, a Grand Prix for Zvyagintsev in exile, Pawlikowski tied for Best Director, and a first-ever Caméra d'Or for a Rwandan filmmaker: the 79th Cannes jury had a clear view of what European cinema is for.
The 79th Cannes Film Festival, held in May 2026 under the presidency of Juliette Binoche, had one of the strongest competition slates in recent memory, and its prize list read like an argument. Cristian Mungiu won his second Palme d'Or, nineteen years after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, with Fjord, a Romanian and Scandinavian co-production shot in four languages that also took the FIPRESCI prize, the Ecumenical Jury award, the François Chalais prize and the Citizenship prize. No other film at the festival collected as much. It also gave Renate Reinsve her first lead for a director outside Norway, three years after The Worst Person in the World (see our 5 Must-Watch Renate Reinsve Films). The Grand Prix went to Andrey Zvyagintsev for Minotaur, his first feature since Loveless (2017) and the first he has made entirely in exile.
Best Director was shared, and the pairing said something by itself. Paweł Pawlikowski came back to the Croisette with Fatherland, a monochrome two-hander about Thomas and Erika Mann driving across the rubble of 1949 Germany. Beside him stood the Spanish duo Los Javis (Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo), whose feature debut The Black Ball, adapted from one of Federico García Lorca's last, unfinished works, drew a twenty-minute ovation. Valeska Grisebach won the Jury Prize for The Dreamed Adventure, her first film since Western (2017). Lukas Dhont, already a Cannes regular after Girl and Close, returned with Coward, a First World War drama whose two young leads, Valentin Campagne and Emmanuel Macchia, shared the Best Actor prize. The Belgian presence the festival has been building since the early Dardenne years is now hard to overlook.
The acting prizes crossed borders. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared Best Actress for Ryusuke Hamaguchi's first French-language film, All of a Sudden, a Japanese, French, Belgian and German co-production, and its win made Cannes's own case for how borderless European art-house has become. Best Screenplay went to the Belgian director Emmanuel Marre for A Man of His Time, his solo feature debut, about a minor functionary's drift into Vichy collaboration. The Caméra d'Or, awarded to the best first feature across all sections, went to Ben'Imana, the debut of Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo and the first film by a Rwandan director ever chosen for Cannes' official selection. Below are all ten prize winners, in the order the jury announced them.
Palme d'Or
Fjord, Cristian Mungiu
Romania · Norway · France · Denmark · Finland · Sweden
Cristian Mungiu's eighth feature gave him his second Palme d'Or, nineteen years after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Fjord is in four languages (English, Romanian, Norwegian and Swedish) and stars Sebastian Stan as a Romanian doctor and Renate Reinsve as his Norwegian wife, who leave Bucharest with their two children to resettle in her remote home village on the Norwegian coast. The fresh start slowly turns into something else as the couple's parenting choices draw the attention of the school, social services and finally the law. Mungiu builds it in the long takes and argued scenes that have defined the New Romanian Wave since the mid-2000s.
Its Cannes haul was extraordinary: the Palme, the FIPRESCI critics' prize, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, the François Chalais prize and the Citizenship prize. Part of the festival press accused the film of moral pre-loading, and Juliette Binoche's jury answered with the top prize, and the film took most of the parallel awards as well. Later reviews in Sight and Sound, The Guardian and Cahiers du cinéma put it among Mungiu's finest work, comparable to 4 Months in formal control and in its refusal to settle the moral question for the viewer. The supporting cast (Lisa Carlehed, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Lisa Loven Kongsli) fills out the village that surrounds the family.
Grand Prix
Minotaur, Andrey Zvyagintsev
France · Latvia · Germany
Andrey Zvyagintsev had not released a feature since Loveless won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2017. The years since took him into hospital and out of Russia. Minotaur is the first film he has made entirely in exile, a Latvian, French and German co-production shot in Russian and loosely reworking Claude Chabrol's La Femme infidèle (1969). It centres on Gleb, a prosperous company director played by Dmitriy Mazurov, whose carefully ordered life begins to crack under corporate pressure and the unsteadiness of the world around him.
The Grand Prix, the festival's second prize, was also a public statement: Cannes welcoming a dissident Russian auteur back into competition and standing behind him. Zvyagintsev films the unravelling with the cold precision and architectural framing he has used since The Return, in long, chilly compositions where money and status go rotten. The film holds a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics read it as a scalpel taken to the moral life of Russia's present-day elites. It continues the study of family and authority that runs through Leviathan and Loveless, and Zvyagintsev remains one of his country's essential moral chroniclers, now working from outside its borders.
Best Director (tied)
Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, The Black Ball
Spain · France
Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, known as Los Javis, are the duo behind the cult musical La llamada and the series Paquita Salas, Veneno and La Mesías, and they built their reputation on Spanish television. The Black Ball is their first feature proper, and it arrived at Cannes 2026 with extraordinary momentum: a Best Director prize shared with Pawlikowski, and a premiere ovation reported at twenty minutes. The film takes its title and impulse from La bola negra, one of Federico García Lorca's last, unfinished projects, and braids together three lives from different eras of Spanish history, including the long shadow of the Franco years.
Sexuality, desire, pain and inheritance pass between the stories like a current. The cast runs from the singer Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau to Lola Dueñas and Penélope Cruz, and the directors fold in musical passages (most famously the old standard "Soldadito español") that could only be theirs. For a debut feature the ambition is considerable, a queer reckoning with national memory on a grand canvas. The prize and the heat around the premiere made The Black Ball one of the boldest Spanish films in years, and proved that Los Javis can carry their flamboyant television sensibility onto the biggest stage in world cinema.
Best Director (tied)
Paweł Pawlikowski, Fatherland
Poland · Germany · France · Italy
Paweł Pawlikowski is among the most decorated European directors alive. Ida (2013) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Cold War (2018) won him Best Director at Cannes. Fatherland brought him back to the Croisette and to a second Cannes Best Director award, this time shared with Los Javis. Set in 1949, it follows the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika (actress, essayist and one-time rally driver) as they drive a black Buick across a Germany still in ruins, from the American-occupied west to Soviet-controlled Weimar.
Sandra Hüller plays Erika opposite Hanns Zischler's Thomas in what is essentially a two-hander, and Pawlikowski shoots it in the spare, luminous black and white and the elliptical compression of Ida and Cold War. At a taut 82 minutes, it fits a continent's reckoning into a single journey. Critics called it a return to his best form, and Mubi took it internationally. Sharing the directing prize with Los Javis meant the jury picked the most controlled and the most exuberant film-making in competition at once and declined to choose between them. With its threads of identity, family, love and guilt running through the rubble of post-war Europe, Fatherland belongs beside Ida and Cold War as another tightly controlled film about the weight of history on private lives.
Jury Prize
The Dreamed Adventure, Valeska Grisebach
Germany · France · Austria · Bulgaria
Valeska Grisebach is one of the central figures of the Berlin School, the loose movement of rigorous German realists that also includes Christian Petzold and Maren Ade. The Dreamed Adventure is her first feature since Western (2017), and after a gap of nearly a decade its place in the main competition, her first time competing for the Palme d'Or, was an event in itself. The Jury Prize confirmed the welcome. The film is set in a town on Bulgaria's south-eastern border, where Veska, an archaeologist, gets entangled with an old acquaintance and, through him, with a smuggling scheme that edges into contested and dangerous territory.
As in Western, Grisebach works at the edge of Europe with non-professional actors (Yana Radeva and Syuleyman Alilov Letifov at the centre) and builds tension from glances, silences and the slow accumulation of trust and risk instead of incident. It is a restrained, watchful film noir that withholds as much as it shows. Critics saw it as a deliberate dismantling of the neo-noir blueprint, trading genre momentum for the ethnographic patience Grisebach is known for. She makes films rarely and has shaped a generation of European realism, and this was among the most discussed titles of the festival, which suggests her unhurried method has lost none of its force.
Best Actress (shared)
Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto for All of a Sudden
Japan · France · Belgium · Germany
Ryusuke Hamaguchi is among the most garlanded filmmakers of his generation. Drive My Car (2021) won the Academy Award for Best International Feature and a Cannes screenplay prize, and Happy Hour and Evil Does Not Exist cemented his standing. All of a Sudden (French title Soudain) is his first film made in France, a Japanese, French, Belgian and German co-production. It centres on Marie-Lou Fontaine, who runs a nursing home in the Paris suburbs and insists, against her colleagues' resistance, on the tender "Humanitude" method of care. Her friendship with Mari Morisaki, a terminally ill Japanese playwright, changes how she sees her work and herself.
Over 196 minutes and two languages, Hamaguchi brings his long, conversational scenes to questions of dignity, attention and mortality. The score is by Samuel Andreyev, and the script is adapted from a book by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono based on a real correspondence. The film holds a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and splitting Best Actress between Efira (a Belgian-French actress in the strongest stretch of her career) and Okamoto felt right for a film built around a friendship: the jury declined to break it apart. A Japanese director winning Best Actress for two performances in a largely French-language film says a good deal about the borderless, attentive cinema Hamaguchi now stands for, and about Cannes keeping that internationalism alive.
Best Actor (shared)
Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne for Coward
Belgium · France · Netherlands
Lukas Dhont's third feature follows Girl (2018) and Close (2022), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Coward is a Belgian, French and Dutch co-production set at the height of the First World War. Pierre, a soldier newly arrived at the front and eager to prove himself, meets Francis, a comrade trying to lift the men's spirits by staging a theatre show behind the lines. Around the violence of the trenches, Dhont builds a study of fear, tenderness and the fragile intimacies that form between men under unbearable pressure.
The Best Actor prize, shared between Valentin Campagne and Emmanuel Macchia, rewarded what Dhont always gets from his young leads: two faces held close enough to feel each other's breath, learning in real time to trust each other. Handheld camerawork and a largely young, partly non-professional cast give the film the texture he is known for. Co-written again with Angelo Tijssens, Coward takes the concerns of Close (masculinity, emotional repression, the cost of conformity) onto a far larger historical canvas. Mubi acquired it for much of the world, and the Cannes premiere drew a long standing ovation. Dhont is still in his thirties, and his films keep returning to the inner lives of boys and men and to what it costs them to feel.
Best Screenplay
Emmanuel Marre for A Man of His Time
Belgium · France
Emmanuel Marre had previously co-directed the well-received Zero Fucks Given (2021) with Julie Lecoustre. A Man of His Time (French title Notre salut) is his most ambitious solo feature, a 155-minute French-Belgian production that goes into one of the most uncomfortable corners of twentieth-century French history. Henri Marre, aged forty-nine, arrives in Vichy with no money and no connections, carrying a self-published political treatise that sets out his patriotic convictions and his engineer's certainties. In the collaborationist administration he sees his chance to become, at last, someone who matters.
Swann Arlaud plays him without caricature or excuses, and Marre treats the period as a study of ordinary ambition turning into complicity, with no interest in costume spectacle. Because it looks at a minor functionary instead of the architects of the regime, the film joins a French line, from Lacombe, Lucien onward, that examines collaboration through small, recognisable men. The Cannes reception was strong: besides the Best Screenplay prize, the film collected the Art et Essai award and a technical citation. Restrained, lucid and damning, it marks Marre as one of the more serious new voices in Francophone cinema. The screenplay prize was a vote for European film that takes an embarrassing history seriously and never flatters it.
Caméra d'Or
Ben'Imana, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo
Rwanda · France · Norway · Gabon
Ben'Imana is the debut feature of Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo and the first film by a Rwandan director ever chosen for the official selection at Cannes. It premiered in Un Certain Regard and won the Caméra d'Or, the prize for the best first film across all sections of the festival. A Rwandan, French and Norwegian co-production with Gabonese participation, it was written by Dusabejambo with Delphine Agut. The year is 2012, and Vénéranda, a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, works within the community-led justice and reconciliation processes that set out to rebuild the country.
As the pressures of that work mount, a crisis inside her own family forces her to test the limits of forgiveness and belief. Dusabejambo gets restrained, lived-in performances from a largely non-professional cast and approaches an almost unbearable subject with patience instead of spectacle. Critics counted it among the real discoveries of the festival. It holds a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and MK2 took on international sales. By placing the aftermath of catastrophe in ordinary lives and choices, Ben'Imana introduces a major new voice and adds to the wider conversation about how a society goes on living after genocide. Of all this year's winners, it is the one whose prize felt most like the festival looking ahead.
Short Film Palme d'Or
For The Opponents, Federico Luis
Argentina
An honest aside: For The Opponents falls outside European Screen's remit. It is an Argentine short, under our sixty-minute feature threshold and outside our continental scope, so it won't appear anywhere else in the catalogue. It is here for completeness, because this is a Cannes 2026 prize recap and the Short Film Palme d'Or belongs in it. Federico Luis is not new to the festival circuit: his feature debut Simón of the Mountain won the Critics' Week grand prize at Cannes in 2024 and a Venice Horizons special mention the same year.
The short continues the textured, low-key realism of his earlier work, and its win caps one of the strongest years in some time for Latin American cinema on the Croisette. We list it alongside the features, as the Cannes jury did, and trust regular readers to look it up. That the Short Film Palme went south of the equator while every other competitive prize stayed in Europe (or in European co-productions) is part of the year's story too.
What the 2026 Jury Was Telling Us
The jury's pattern is hard to miss. Mungiu, Zvyagintsev, Pawlikowski, Grisebach, Dhont, Marre, Dusabejambo: nearly every prize went to a director whose earlier work the festival had already canonised or, in Dusabejambo's case, to a national cinema that had never been visible at this level. The 2026 Cannes confirmed that the auteurs the festival raised in the 2010s have reached their mature decade and are still working at the top of their craft. Mungiu's second Palme, Pawlikowski's second directing prize and Zvyagintsev's Grand Prix all point the same way.
The politics were easy to read as well: Zvyagintsev back from forced absence, Mungiu on the gap between professed and actual tolerance in a small European community, Marre dissecting Vichy collaboration, Dusabejambo's Rwandan reckoning. None of these are subtle subjects, and the jury wasn't subtle in rewarding them. Taken together, the prizes made a case for European cinema as a slow, patient, watchful art that takes politics seriously without turning into a pamphlet. The Belgians kept coming (Dhont and Marre took three prizes between them), the Berlin School reasserted itself through Grisebach, and Los Javis announced a Spanish generation that can put television flamboyance and the gravity of Lorca on the same canvas.
Then there was the Caméra d'Or for Ben'Imana, a first feature from a country that had never had a film in the official selection. It hinted at where European cinema might go next: outward, into co-productions with the global south and stories the continent doesn't have on its own. Like any jury, this one showed us where it thought the form was alive.
For a wider view of the year that produced these films, see our companion round-ups: the 10 Must-Watch European Films of 2025 and the just-published 10 Must-Watch European Films of 2024. For the national contexts behind two of this year's winners, our 10 Must-Watch Polish Films sits naturally alongside Pawlikowski, and 10 Must-Watch German Films of 2025 traces the Berlin School line that brought Grisebach back into competition.
Cristian Mungiu’s second Palme d’Or caps two decades of an extraordinary national movement, and the full story is in our 10 Must-Watch Romanian Films.
For the other half of the European festival year, our Venice 2026 Winners List covers every prize the Venezia 83 jury awarded, from May el-Toukhy's Golden Lion to a Lion of the Future that lands remarkably close to this year's Caméra d'Or.
