The awards ceremony for the 78th Cannes Film Festival is underway, as the 2025 fest comes to its dramatic dénouement in France on Saturday night. The Competition jury, led by French actress Juliette Binoche, will announce this year’s winners, including the best picture Palme d’Or, from the stage of the Grand Théâtre Lumière.
Alongside president Binoche, the jury includes actors Halle Berry, Jeremy Strong, and Italy’s Alba Rohrwacher; directors Dieudo Hamadi, Hong Sang-soo, Payal Kapadia, and Carlos Reygadas; and French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani.
The festival got its own dramatic twist ending early on Saturday when a regional power outage shut down the electrical grid serving Cannes and much of the surrounding region. The outage, apparently caused by deliberate sabotage on the electrical infrastructure, disrupted early morning screenings and forced hotels, shops and cafes in the city to close.
But the festival was largely unaffected. The Palais, where the closing ceremony is held, switched to emergency power and carried on much as before.
Cannes had a particularly strong line-up this year, with no single film the overall frontrunner going into the awards.
Brazilian actor Wagner Moura took best actor for his starring role in The Secret Agent,
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 1970s-set Brazilian political thriller. In a rare double award, Filho also took best director for the feature.
German director Mascha Schilinski won the Grand Prize of the Jury for Sound of Falling, only her second film, an epic family drama set across 4 generations in the same rural farmhouse. She shared the prize with Spanish director Oliver Laxe for Sirat, a techno-infused apocalyptic drama set in the Moroccan desert.
Tonight’s ceremony is also shaping up as a showdown between indie distributors Neon and Mubi. Neon, which has released the last five Palme d’Or winners in the U.S., has maneuvered to keep its streak going. Tom Quinn’s taste-making firm came into Cannes with two competition titles — Trier’s Sentimental Value, and the poorly-received Alpha from Titane director Julia Ducournau — and has snatched up three more Palme contenders, acquiring The Secret Agent, Sirat, and It Was Just an Accident, in the final days of the festival.
Arthouse streaming service Mubi, which got into distribution in a big way with last year’s breakout The Substance (a Cannes 2024 title), made the single biggest deal of the market, acquiring Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, for North America and multiple international territories for a cool $24 million. Mubi has another strong Palme d’Or contender in Sound of Falling, which it snatched up in another multi-territory deal, including the U.S., earlier this week.
A full list of winners follows:
Palme d’Or
Grand Prix
Jury Prize
Mascha Schilinski for Sound of Falling and Oliver Laxe for Sirat (tie)
Best Director
Kleber Mendonça Filho for The Secret Agent
Best Screenplay
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for Young Mothers
Best Actress
Best Actor
Wagner Moura for The Secret Agent
Special Prize
Resurrection, dir. Bi Gan
Camera d’Or for Best First Film
The President’s Cake, dir: Hassan Hadi
Palme d’Or for Best Short Film
I’m Glad You’re Dead Now, dir: Tawfeek Barhom
