‘Fjord’ Takes Home the Palme d’Or at Cannes
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Another Cannes Film Festival has concluded, and the iconic film festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or has been awarded to Fjord from director Cristian Mungiu. Nepal and Nepalese cinema made history at the festival by winning the country’s first-ever award at Cannes. Elephants in the Fog, a Nepalese film from director Abinash Bikram Shah, won the Jury Prize and the film appeared in the Un Certain Regard category. And Rwanda’s first-ever film to screen at the festival, Ben’Imana, won the Camera d’Or prize. The film explores reconciliation 20 years after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda against the Tutsi.
At the closing ceremony over the weekend, which took place inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière along the famed Croisette, French actress Eye Haïdara hosted the closing ceremony (she was host for the opening ceremony, too).
The festival awards had the honor of being presented by cinema heavyweights, including Geena Davis, Xavier Dolan, Pierfrancesco Favino, Gael García Bernal, Nadine Labaki, and Zoe Saldaña. (Davis also appears on this year’s festival poster – it’s an image from her film Thelma & Louise, which premiered at Cannes in 1991.)
Barbra Streisand was presented with an honorary Palme d’Or during the closing ceremony, and French actress Isabelle Huppert received the award for Streisand in her absence. The Palme d’Or was presented to Fjord by Scottish actress Tilda Swinton. Fjord stars actor Sebastian Stan as Mihai, a Romanian engineer, who relocates from Romania to Norway with his wife and five children after the death of his parents. Traditional Romanian culture and progressive Norwegian culture clash when their daughter Elia arrives at school with bruises, and the authorities get involved. The family’s lifestyle and strict religious upbringing come under intense scrutiny in their new home in Norway. The film explores themes of cancel culture and public outrage, cultural differences, and trust. Stan is a Romanian-American actor best known for his role as Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier in the Marvel films.
It’s noteworthy that Fjord marks the seventh consecutive Palme d’Or winner by a film distributed by Neon studios. Neon is an independent film studio founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York. Previous Palme winners from Neon include Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, Anora, Anatomy of a Fall, Titane, and It Was Just an Accident. Cannes is known as a precursor and tastemaker for the Academy Awards, and that has proven true for many of the films. Anora won five Oscars in 2025. And it was only the fourth film to win both the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Picture. Neon’s Parasite, which won the Palme in 2019, went on to become the studio’s highest-grossing film and a massive global hit. It was also the first non-English film to win the coveted Academy Award for Best Picture. The film was directed by South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. South Korea’s Park Chan-wook chaired this year’s Cannes jury.
Elephants in the Fog was a directorial debut for Shah. The thriller takes place in a Nepalese village where a woman goes missing. And the matriarch of the community is torn between the woman’s disappearance and staying to search for her, or fleeing with the man she loves. Other films that made a splash in the Un Certain Regard winners list included Everytime, Iron Boy, and Congo Boy.
There were recurrent themes that emerged from the festival this year. Notably, artificial intelligence (AI) was a big, ongoing topic at press conferences, panel discussions, and conversations throughout the festival. As reported by Variety, actress Tilda Swinton said, “I believe as long as what we’re not producing is formulaic and in some way tiring for the audience, AI doesn’t have a chance.” The actress spoke in conversation with moderator Didier Allouch.
Peter Jackson had a more practical stance on AI. The director, who won an honorary Palme d’Or this year for his contributions to cinema, said, “I don’t dislike it at all. To me, it’s just a special effect. It’s no different from other special effects.” Juror Demi Moore – and red carpet fashion darling of this year’s festival – had a similar collaborative take, saying during the festival’s jury press conference, “AI is here. To fight it, is a battle that we will lose. To find ways that we can work with it, I think is a more valuable path. But what it can never replace is what true art comes from, which is not the physical; it comes from the soul.”
Lead photo credit : Mungiu holding the Palme d'Or, awarded to Fjord, at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Photo: John Sears / WikiPortraits
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