Mungiu’s Fjord takes a second Palme d’Or as Cannes splits Best Director between Los Javis and Pawlikowski

The 79th Cannes Film Festival ended not with a coronation but with a redistribution. Cristian Mungiu walked away with the Palme d’Or for Fjord, his English-language debut, and used the stage to say that the state of the world is not the best, that he is not proud of what his generation is leaving its children, and that something has to change. It was the speech of a director who has spent his career filming institutions failing people one bureaucratic decision at a time, and the jury led by Park Chan-wook clearly heard it. The win makes Mungiu the tenth filmmaker to take two Palmes, nineteen years after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and hands Neon its seventh consecutive top prize — a distribution streak with no precedent in the festival’s history.

Fjord follows a Romanian Evangelical couple, played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, who move to the wife’s remote Norwegian hometown and run straight into a child-welfare system that reads their parenting as abuse. Mungiu builds the whole film out of that mismatch — two value systems, both convinced they are protecting the same children — and refuses to let either side become the villain. It is the kind of moral knot the jury rewarded all night.

The Grand Prix went to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, the exiled Russian director’s first film since illness nearly killed him. Working from the bones of Claude Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle, he turns a story of infidelity into a portrait of power and rot in provincial Russia, and the competition answered its premiere with an eight-minute ovation. Valeska Grisebach took the Jury Prize for The Dreamed Adventure, a quieter film that critics had ranked among the festival’s best.

The acting and directing prizes were where the jury showed its hand. Best Director was split between Spain’s Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — the duo known as Los Javis — for their Lorca-rooted queer epic The Black Ball, and Poland’s Pawel Pawlikowski for Fatherland. Best Actress was shared by Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, the two leads of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour-plus drama All of a Sudden, a film about a nursing-home director and a dying playwright that the jury could not separate into a single performance. Best Actor doubled up too, going to Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne for Lukas Dhont’s Coward. Emmanuel Marre took Best Screenplay for A Man of His Time, and the Camera d’Or for best first feature went to Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo’s Ben’Imana.

The conversation that started before the envelopes were even opened was about Fatherland. Pawlikowski’s film finished top of Screen International’s critics’ grid, the closest thing the festival has to a daily betting line, and a grid leader that does not win the Palme always becomes the story. A shared Best Director reads, from one angle, as the jury admiring the craft while declining to crown the film — a distinction critics spent the closing hours parsing. The split with Los Javis only sharpened it: two very different films, one statuette, no clear hierarchy.

There were emptier hands than Pawlikowski’s. Na Hong-jin’s Hope, which drew some of the strongest individual notices of the competition, left with nothing, and so did James Gray’s Paper Tiger — Gray remaining, after years of Cannes loyalty, a director the festival adores and the juries keep passing over. Neither omission produced a scandal, but both fed the running argument about how far a jury’s taste should track the press room’s.

The real surprise was structural. Park Chan-wook’s panel tied three of its prizes — director, actor and actress — which is less a series of accidents than a philosophy. A jury that refuses to choose between two performances or two filmmakers is making a case that the work this year resisted single-winner logic, and the breadth of the spread, across Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Polish, French, Japanese and Belgian films, suggests a deliberate map of a competition the jury saw as unusually level. That Fjord rose above a field that flat tells you how completely Mungiu’s film consolidated the room.

What changes now is the runway. Neon carries another Palme winner into awards season with Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as its faces, and a seventh straight win turns the distributor’s instinct into a system worth studying. The Black Ball left Cannes with a United States deal at Netflix and a Spanish theatrical release set for the autumn. The honorary Palme d’Or went to Barbra Streisand, presented by Isabelle Huppert, closing the 79th edition on the festival’s own sense of lineage. The competition films now scatter toward release; the argument about whether the jury got it right will outlast all of them.