Here’s who won big at Cannes 2024
Jesse Plemons took home the Best Actor award at Cannes this year, for his three-part performance in Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds Of Kindness
Aux News Cannes
The Cannes Film Festival has wrapped up for another year, and with it, the usual doling out of fancy trophies with French names that don’t literally mean “This one is the first place one, that one is good but not quite as good”—but, c’mon, they totally are. This year’s winner of the Big One, the Palme d’Or, for instance, was American filmmaker Sean Baker, whose film Anora makes him the first Stateside movie-maker to win the big prize in nearly a decade. Per Variety, Baker dedicated the win for his film, which is about an exotic dancer who ends up in a relationship with the son of a Russian oligarch, to “all sex workers, past, present and future.” The Florida Project director also stumped for the primacy of the theatrical experience, pointing light jabs at tech companies who might want us to prefer “watching a film at home, while scrolling through your phone and checking emails and half-paying attention.”
Meanwhile, the Grand Prix prize (“Second place,” to us uncouth Americans) was distributed to Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, the Indian director’s story of two Mumbai nurses who take a metaphor-laden road trip together. Miguel Gomes won the Best Director prize for his new period film Grand Tour, while Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof received a Special Award after braving an 8-year prison sentence to show his film The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, examining Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom movement, at the festival.
Over in acting, meanwhile, we had one guy winning a trophy for three roles, and three women sharing one; Jesse Plemons won for his multi-part role in Yorgos Lanthimos’ anthology film Kinds Of Kindness, while the Actress(es) award was shared by Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Karla Sofía Gascón for their work on Emilia Pérez. (Lily Gladstone, handing out the award, called out the film’s depiction of “the harmony of sisterhood.”) The film, directed by Jacques Audiard, also won the Jury Prize, which isn’t literally the third-place trophy, but kind of totally is. Finally, Coralie Fargeat won Best Screenplay for their work on Demi Moore/Margaret Qualley cosmetic surgery movie The Substance.
You can see the full list of Cannes winners (including unofficial stuff like the Palme Dog, recognizing the best dog in any of the movies shown at the festival) over at Variety.