There were a lot of winners at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The top prize went to Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda for his movie Shoplifters, “a moving portrait of an self-made family scraping by at the bottom of Japanese society.” Although the Palme d’Or isn’t a reliable awards barometer like the people’s choice award at TIFF, it still gives a movie a level of recognition it might not otherwise would have received. It’s particularly a boon to foreign-language films such as The Square, Dheepan, Amour, and The White Ribbon, just to name a handful of winners from the last ten years. While only Amour went on to get a Best Picture nomination, the Palme still helps put a movie on cinephiles’ radars, and I’ll certainly be on the lookout for Shoplifters.
The other big winner was Spike Lee, who took home the Grand Prix for his newest film, BlacKkKlansman, which is based on the true story of a black detective who was able to infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Lee accepted the prize “on behalf of the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, New York.” Lee famously lost out on the Palme d’Or back in 1989 when he should have won for his monumental Do the Right Thing (the winner that year was Sex, Lies and Videotape).
Check out the full list of winners below via Variety:
via Collider