Panahi’s Palme d’Or—and More

In 2010, they clamped down hard. Panahi, charged with “propaganda against the regime,” was arrested, imprisoned, and eventually placed under house arrest. At Cannes that year, Juliette Binoche, this year’s jury president, held up a sign reading “Jafar Panahi” as she accepted the award for Best Actress for her performance in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy—Panahi was Kiarostami’s assistant director on Through the Olive Trees (1994), and Kiarostami dictated the first draft of The White Balloon. Filmmakers, critics, and festivals around the world called for Panahi’s release.

Despite being banned from making films, Panahi carried on working with unflinching courage. One of the films he shot clandestinely during these years, Taxi (2015), won the Golden Bear in Berlin. In the summer of 2022, Panahi was arrested yet again, and early in 2023, word got out from Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison that he had stopped eating. Two days later, he was released. Last Tuesday, for the first time in fifteen years, he attended a public screening of one of his own films.

For Slate’s Sam Adams, “as astonishing as Panahi’s mere presence on the Croisette was, the movie itself is even more so.” Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), his pregnant wife, and their young daughter pull into a garage where a mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), immediately recognizes the wheezing sound of Eghbal’s prosthetic leg. “Years ago,” writes Adams, “Vahid was thrown in prison and tortured for taking part in a political protest, and although he never saw his tormentor’s face, he’d know that squeak anywhere—or so he thinks.”

Vahid abducts Eghbal, throws him into a wooden, coffin-like box, and carts him around town in a van, gathering others also convinced that they were tortured by this same man. A fierce debate ensues over what to do about it. For Justin Chang, “this deftly tone-shifting film soon reveals itself as a powerful moral thriller about the uncertainty of the truth, the abuses of the Iranian regime, the consequences of physical and psychological torture, and the choice between revenge and mercy.”

“The first time I was in prison I was in solitary confinement,” Panahi tells the Guardian’s Xan Brooks. “I was on my own in a tiny cell and they would take me out blindfolded to a place where I would sit in front of a wall and hear this voice at my back. It was the voice of the man who would question me—sometimes for two hours, sometimes for eight hours. And I would just hang on his voice all that time, fantasizing about who this person was from his voice. And I had an intuition that someday this voice would be an aspect of something I’d write or shoot and give a creative life to.”

“A philosophical odyssey playing out behind the windshield,” writes Mark Asch for Film Comment, “It Was Just an Accident is an accomplished road movie—the axiomatic genre of the Iranian New Wave, for which the car is both a bubble of privacy and a literal vehicle for exploration. As the Pirandellian ensemble talk in circles and the man in the box stirs, Panahi draws out moments of absurdist comedy and existential urgency, building to a climactic single-take interrogation, a cathartic aria that’s been forthcoming since long before the cameras started rolling.”

Binoche and her fellow jurors—actors Halle Berry, Alba Rohrwacher, and Jeremy Strong; filmmakers Payal Kapadia, Dieudo Hamadi, Hong Sangsoo, and Carlos Reygadas; and writer Leïla Slimani—awarded the Grand Prix to Joachim Trier’s rapturously received Sentimental Value. Stellan Skarsgård stars as Gustave, a film director looking to revive his moribund career with a movie about his mother, and when he asks his estranged daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) to play the lead, she refuses. So he opts for another rising star, an American played by Elle Fanning.

For the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, this “tremendous follow-up to Trier’s 2021 international breakthrough hit The Worst Person in the World flows with a ravishing freeness through the many complex strictures it builds for itself: layered family psychologies; behaviors and secrets that recur and reform across generations; the therapeutic value of art to its makers. It’s hardly a guilty pleasure movie, though its sheer pleasantness comes with a certain pang of conscience: should cinema this intelligent be this much fun to watch?”

The Jury Prize was awarded jointly to two more critical favorites, and we took a first look at both of them last week. In Oliver Laxe’s Sirât, ravers trek across the Moroccan desert, while Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling shifts between the stories of four girls growing up in the same farm house in separate eras.

A Special Award was presented to Bi Gan’s Resurrection, which Jessica Kiang, writing for Variety, calls “a marvelously maximalist movie of opulent ambition that is actually five or six movies, each at once playful and peculiar and part of an overarchingly melancholy elegy for the dream of twentieth-century cinema and the lives we lived within it.” For much, much more on Resurrection, listen to Kiang discuss the film with Nicholas Rapold on The Last Thing I Saw and to this episode of the Film Comment Podcast.

Kleber Mendonça Filho won Best Director for The Secret Agent, a sprawling tale set in 1977 Recife during some of the darkest days of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Wagner Moura, who won Best Actor, plays Marcelo “with soulful eyes and a cloak of melancholy and hurt,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “Unfolded with the patient glee of a three-volume novelist firmly in control of his craft,” writes Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, “the complicated plot revolves around the slow disclosure of who Marcelo is and his precise relationship to a shadowy group of corporate shitheads and other sinister authoritarians.”

“Photographed by Evgenia Alexandrova in Panavision and rife with vintage wipe edits, split-diopter shots, and needle drops,” writes Leonardo Goi at the Film Stage, The Secret Agent—which also won a FIPRESCI Prize—“doesn’t just exist in conversation with the genre films from the decade in which most of it unfurls; it also testifies, time and again, to the director’s unwavering belief in cinema’s capacity to disquiet and mesmerize.”

Nadia Melliti won Best Actress for her portrayal of Fatima—a senior at her high school in Paris and a devout Muslim terrified that her growing attraction to women will get her cast out of her Franco-Algerian household—in Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister, the winner of this year’s Queer Palm. Vulture’s Rachel Handler quotes from a series of raves for Melliti’s performance and notes that her “incredible turn is all the more impressive considering it’s not just her first lead role, but her first time acting. Ever.” The Little Sister, adds Handler, is “a sensitive, moving, often quite sexy (a lot of all-time cinematic makeouts here) coming-of-age story, one that avoids a lot of the genre’s trappings in favor of something subtler and more complex.”

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won Best Screenplay for Young Mothers, which for David Rooney is “the filmmakers’ most surprising work in years. It provides unfiltered emotional access to the anxieties and hopes of five vulnerable working-class teenage women and the babies requiring their love and care, often when they can barely care for themselves.” As an ensemble piece, Young Mothers “marks a shift for the writer-directors, whose work tends predominantly to lock in on one or two main characters.” The new film is also “closer to docufiction than any of their recent work.”

Debut features by three actors—Harris Dickinson’s Urchin, Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great, and Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water—sponged up nearly all the attention paid to the Un Certain Regard program this year. Only Dickinson’s film scored an award, though. Frank Dillane won Best Actor for playing a homeless Londoner struggling to get back on his feet, and “Urchin couldn’t have been better with anyone else,” finds the Telegraph’s Tim Robey. “A true actor’s director,” writes the Los Angeles Times’ Amy Nicholson, “Dickinson invests so much life into his bit characters that even players with only a line or two feel like they could spin off into their own movies. Urchin is rich in confidence without a penny of do-gooder pity.”

The jury presided over by Molly Manning Walker (How to Have Sex) presented the program’s top award, the Un Certain Regard Prize, to Diego Céspedes’s first feature, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo. Set in 1982 in a mining village in Chile, the story centers on Flamingo (Matías Catalán), a trans woman who performs in the local cabaret.

“Céspedes’s labyrinthine drama flirts with absurdism in building a reality where the dark sores that mark the skin of the men who cross paths with Flamingo are not a virus eating away at the body, but the evil consequence of a mysterious plague, transmitted through looking into each other’s eyes,” writes Rafa Sales Ross for Little White Lies. “Seen mostly through the eyes of twelve-year-old Lydia [Tamara Cortés] as she grapples with her mother’s curse, this often tender drama does not shy away from the brutality queer bodies are often subjected to but rebels against making it its gravitational center.”

Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet, the winner of the Jury Prize, is “a hilarious fable about trying to lead a creative life and failing miserably at making ends meet,” writes Murtada Elfadl for Variety. Introducing first-time actor Ubeimar Ríos as an alcoholic with writer’s block, the film’s “tone shifts from absurdist to serious to satirical and back again.”

Brothers Arab and Tarzan Nasser won the award for Best Directing for Once Upon a Time in Gaza, a blend of comedy, action, and suspense set in Gaza in 2007 but shot for obvious reasons in Jordan. Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay), an assistant at a falafel shop, is drafted by a filmmaker (Issaq Elias) to star as the rebel hero in the movie he’s making.

“At times,” writes Yasmine Kandil for Little White Lies, “the balance of theatricality and dark comedy in Once Upon a Time in Gaza becomes reminiscent of a medium known across the MENA region as Musalsalat—soap operas (most commonly produced in Egypt) that tackle social and political commentary, which air nightly throughout the month of Ramadan. The melodrama derives from rich cultural specificity that lends itself well to this tale of love, loss, and unrest.”

Cleo Diára won Best Actress for playing Diára, a Guinean woman Portuguese environmental engineer Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem) falls for while assessing the potential impact of a projected highway that would cut through Guinea-Bissau in Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm. “Pinho is a patient, perceptive, generous filmmaker,” writes Padaí Ó Maolchalann at In Review Online. I Only Rest in the Storm runs three and a half hours, and “there’s something to savor in every moment, every element of this deceptively bold film, dense in the breadth of its conceptual concerns and in their elusive, ever-malleable potential meanings, yet swift, light, and blessed with a sweet sense of humor.”

Writer and director Harry Lighton won Best Screenplay for Pillion, starring Harry Melling as Colin, a shy traffic warden living with his parents (Douglas Hodge and Lesley Sharp) in the outer London borough of Bromley and falling for Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a leathered-up biker. Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson finds that Pillion “lets a potent question hang in the air: when does a willingly agreed-upon abnegation of autonomy become something less than consensual?” Ultimately, Lighton’s first feature “deftly balances squirmy comedy with gentle pathos, social suspense with offbeat warmth.”

The Palme d’Or for a short film went to Tawfeek Barholm’s I’m Glad You’re Dead Now, the story of two brothers’ return to the island of their childhood. “Secrets untold and emotions unsaid run through this work, a piece that manages to be massively powerful while using some brilliant narrative economy,” writes Laurence Boyce at Cineuropa.

The Golden Eye, the award for the best documentary premiering in any section at the festival, went to Déni Oumar Pitsaev’s Imago, which won the Critics’ Week Jury Prize last Wednesday. The next day, Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake won the People’s Choice award presented by the Directors’ Fortnight, and on Saturday, this story of a young girl tasked with baking a treat in honor of Saddam Hussein’s birthday won this year’s Camera d’Or.

“In terms of the competition films, at least, this has been one of the most enjoyable, well-built slates I’ve seen in the fifteen years or so that I’ve been attending the festival,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek. Many seem to agree, including the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, who writes that “this year’s festival was gratifyingly strong, the finest in a long time.” And for Screen’s Tim Grierson, Cannes 2025 was “a deeply great edition of the festival.”