Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d'Or at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival for his film Fjord, making it his second win of the festival's top prize. His first came in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
According to a report by Deadline, Fjord follows Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, immigrant parents of five children who move from Romania to Lisbet's small Norwegian hometown. When a neighboring family spots bruises on the couple's daughter, a child services investigation tears the family apart. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play the parents. The film is based on the experiences of a real-life Romanian family.
At the awards press conference, Mungiu spoke about the film's themes of prejudice and division. "We need to encourage this attitude, where we don't rush to judge the other," he said. "We all use lots of stereotypes. We include people in categories." He added, "You'll eventually learn that they're not different from you." He also said, "We all have survival instincts — we see others as enemies. But we claim to be civilized people and civilization means this attempt to lower down your instincts and be a little bit more open."
Mungiu called the Palme d'Or win "humbling" and noted that "awards are often a result of context or circumstance" and that "it's important to focus on the film and not the prize." He also pointed out that in the two days before the award, Fjord had won five prizes at the festival. "The film speaks to different levels of society," he said.
The 79th Cannes Film Festival was notable for the near-total absence of Hollywood studio films, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Filmmakers including Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg chose not to bring their upcoming projects to the Croisette. There was not a single studio movie on the famous red carpet. The festival's largest red-carpet crowd gathered for a 25th anniversary midnight screening of The Fast and the Furious, which reportedly brought Vin Diesel to tears.
LGBTQ+ cinema was a dominant force in competition this year. Ira Sachs' The Man I Love, starring Rami Malek as a gay performance artist navigating the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, received a 10-minute standing ovation. The Spanish directing duo known as the Javis, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, earned a reported 20-minute standing ovation for La Bola Negra, a film weaving together three generations of queer men across the Spanish Civil War and beyond. Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont also competed with Coward, a WWI drama about queer love.
The Hollywood Reporter described the festival overall as more subdued than past editions, with a lineup that functioned less as a showcase of immediate hits and more as a reflection of shifting forces inside the independent film industry, including the growing impact of artificial intelligence across production and marketing.
