The winners of the 79th Cannes Film Festival have been announced at the closing ceremony on Saturday, as the world’s most closely watched film festival again gathered major auteurs, debut filmmakers and awards-season contenders on the French Riviera.
The 2026 Palme d'Or is awarded to Fjord by Cristian Mungiu, and thus succeeded A Simple Accident by Jafar Panahi of 2025.
The film, which draws on several recent real-life incidents, presents itself as a case study in the deepening divide between progressive and traditional values. It follows the Gheorghiu family, fervent Romanian evangelicals who relocate to a small Norwegian town on the edge of a fjord.
Mihai, portrayed by Sebastian Stan, fresh from his acclaimed turn as Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024), is a Romanian aeronautical engineer married to a Norwegian woman, Lisbet. When the couple moves back to her native country, he reconnects with parts of her extended family and secures work as a computer programmer within the local evangelical community. Deeply religious, they raise their children with strict discipline and intense devotion as an expression of their faith. At first, institutions and neighbours greet them warmly. That changes when, one day at school, a teacher notices unexplained bruises on one of the daughters’ bodies.
