Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” a Death and the Maiden–like drama about a group of Iranians confronting a man whom they suspect was their torturer in prison, won the Palme d’Or on Saturday night at the 78th Cannes Film Festival.
The film marked a triumphant return to Cannes for the Iranian director, who had found ways to show work at the festival in recent years—“This Is Not a Film” in 2011 was said to have been smuggled to France on a thumb drive—but had not been able to attend until this year due to a travel ban from Iranian authorities. When “It Was Just an Accident” had its premiere on Tuesday, his arrival received a standing ovation in the Lumière theater. When the Palme was announced in the same theater on Saturday, Panahi, sporting sunglasses and looking overjoyed, lifted his hands in the air and sat back in his seat for a moment before taking the stage.
At a press conference that followed the awards ceremony, the jury president, Juliette Binoche, discussed the ways that political and artistic impulses combine in Panahi’s film. “The film springs from a feeling of resistance, survival, which is absolutely necessary today,” she said in French. “So we felt it was important to give this film the paramount award. Fifteen years ago, Jafar Panahi was in prison.”
She suggested that part of the movie’s power derived from that aspect of Panahi’s experience. “We’re in a world ruled by revenge, violence, cruelty,” she said. This film, she said, came from someone who had been imprisoned and had then chosen to make a work that raises the possibility of rising above revenge.
Binoche’s fellow juror Jeremy Strong emphasized that awarding “It Was Just an Accident” was not simply a “gesture,” the word used by the moderator, Didier Allouch. “It’s important to say, for us, we wanted to recognize films we felt were transcendent intrinsically as pieces of work,” Strong said.
The second-place Grand Prix went to Joachim Trier for “Sentimental Value,” centered on the complicated relationship between an actress and her famous filmmaker father. It reunited Trier with Renate Reinsve, the star of his “The Worst Person in the World” (2021). “We live in a time of tremendous excess and saturation of images,” Trier said when accepting the award. “Moving images are being thrown at us all the time.” He said he wanted to pay homage to the Cannes Film Festival for being a place where the “image that we take time to look at, the image where we can identify with each other in contemplation and empathy” could be shown.
The best-director prize went to Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho for “The Secret Agent,” and there was a brief delay before he appeared on the stage. “I was having Champagne,” he explained. He had just been up there to accept the best-actor prize for his lead, Wagner Moura.
Nadia Melliti won best actress for her performance in Hafsia Herzi’s “The Little Sister,” in which she plays a young woman who works to reconcile her identity as a devout Muslim with the discovery that she is gay.
The Dardenne brothers, who have won the Palme d’Or twice and also taken home just about every other prize that Cannes has to offer, won their second screenplay prize (after one for “Lorna’s Silence” in 2008) for “Young Mothers,” a tender portrait of teenage mothers working through tough choices.
The jury prize—third place, in a way, but also an award often given to boundary-pushing films—was split between two of the competition’s most experimental titles, Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling” and Oliver Laxe’s “Sirât.”
And the jury invented one more prize—a “special award”—for yet another singular work, Bi Gan’s late-premiering “Resurrection.” “It was like an unidentified flying object, an amazing invention, which is the stuff of directors’ dreams,” Binoche said of the film. “It was so different.”