The 71st Cannes International Film Festival wrapped up earlier this afternoon, with a closing ceremony that saw Spike Lee take home the festival’s Grand Prix (a.k.a. “second place”), while Japanese family drama Shoplifters snagged the coveted Palme d’Or.
Our own A.A. Dowd has been at Cannes all week, sending back dispatches and highlighting his personal picks, reviews, and predictions. (Unfortunately, the late scheduling of Shoplifters, and the vagaries of international travel, precluded a review of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s big winner, but you can see our coverage of Lee’s BlacKkKlansman here.) Cate Blanchett served as the president of this year’s jury, and tacitly addressed questions about why the group chose to honor a film from a male director—keeping the Palme d’Or’s man-only streak alive into its 25th year since Jane Campion won for The Piano in 1993—instead of entries like Nadine Labaniki’s Capernaum or Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy As Lazzaro:
All of us, men and women alike on the jury, we’d love to see more female directorial voices represented. And I feel that there’s a very strong drive within the organization of the Cannes film festival to make sure that they explore, with their ‘curious’ hat on, female perspectives. There perhaps weren’t quite as many female-driven narratives as I’d have liked. But there were certainly some powerhouse performances—we awarded one, and there were several more we could have chosen from.
Capernaum ended up winning the festival’s Jury Prize, while Rohrwacher tied for Best Screenplay with 3 Faces’ Nader Saeivar. French film icon Jean-Luc Godard won a Special Palme d’Or for his borderline-incomprehensible Image Book, meanwhile, while Marcello Fonte won Best Actor for Dogman, My Little One’s Samal Yeslyamova took home Best Actress, and Pawel Pawlikowski scored best director for Cold War. You can see the full list of winners here, and our full coverage of Cannes 2018 is available at this link.