Cannes Crowns Its 2026 Winner

Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu's drama about political polarization, Fjord, won top honors at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. The film found wide acclaim for its engrossing tale of what Mungiu called "left-wing fundamentalism," per the AP. It stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as Romanian Evangelicals who move to Norway, but soon after have their children taken from them by child services for spanking them. Mungiu becomes just the 10th filmmaker to win the Palme d'Or twice. His 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a Romanian abortion drama, won the award in 2007.

• "Today, the society is split. It's divided. It's radicalized," said Mungiu. "This film is a pledge against any type of fundamentalism. It's a pledge for these things we quote very often, like trauma and inclusion and empathy. These are lovely words but we need to apply them more often."
• Second place: The Grand Prix, or second prize, went to Minotaur, Andrey Zvyagintsev's domestic thriller set against Russia's war with Ukraine. Loosely based on director Claude Chabrol's The Unfaithful Wife of 1969, Minotaur is about a Russian businessman suspicious of his wife's indiscretions. At the same time, he's tasked with conscripting 150 of his workers for Vladimir Putin's war machine.
• Director: Two films won for best director: the Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski, for his postwar drama Fatherland, and the Spanish creative duo Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo for a generation-spanning queer epic, The Black Ball.
• Actress: Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, the two stars of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden, shared the best actress award. In the elegantly empathetic drama, the two portray women brought together in friendship out of their mutual sense of care for others.
• Actor: The jury also split the best actor prize. They chose Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, the two stars of Coward, Lukas Dhont's drama about young Belgian men sent to the front lines of World War II.