Cannes Film Festival 2026 full list of winners: Cristian Mungiu wins Palme d'Or for Fjord, Minotaur gets Grand Prix

The jury, headed by Park Chan-wook, awarded best director to Pawel Pawlikowski for Fatherland and duo Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo for The Black Ball.

The Cannes Film Festival handed over the official awards during the closing ceremony of the 79th edition on the last day. The president of the nine-member jury that decided the awards was headed by Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook. He announced that the top prize of the festival went to Fjord, directed by acclaimed Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu. He had previously won the top prize at Cannes in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

Director Cristian Mungiu, Palme d'Or award winner for the film Fjord, pose next to cast members Renate Reinsve, Sebastian Stan and Tilda Swinton, on stage during the closing ceremony of the 79th Cannes Film Festival. (REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier)

About Fjord

Fjord stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as Romanian Evangelicals who move to Norway, but soon after have their children taken from them by child services for spanking them. Mungiu has now become the 10th filmmaker to win the Palme d'Or twice. Fjord also won the François Chalais Prize, the FIPRESCI Prize, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.

"This is a message about tolerance, inclusion and empathy. These are wonderful values that we all cherish, but we need to put them into practice more often," Mungiu told the audience. Mungiu is a Cannes regular, having also won Best Screenplay in 2012 for Beyond the Hills and Best Director in 2016 for Graduation. His last film, RMN, was part of the competition in 2022 but did not win any award. In 2013, he was selected as a member of the main competition jury.

Meanwhile, the political thriller Minotaur, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, won the Grand Prix second prize. The family drama, which depicts a callous businessman caught up in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is loosely based on Claude Chabrol’s 1969 film The Unfaithful Wife. The director nearly died during the Covid 19 pandemic, spending more than a month in a coma during treatment in Europe. Now living in exile in France, the director got on stage to accept the award and told the audience in a message addressed to Putin. "Put an end to the carnage, the whole world is waiting for it," he said.

The Camera d’Or, which is an award for best first film, was given to Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo’s post-genocide drama Ben’Imana. It was the first Rwandan film to be officially selected for the festival.

Check out full list of winners:

Palme d'Or: Fjord (director Cristian Mungiu)

Grand Prix: Minotaur (director Andrey Zvyagintsev)

Jury Prize: The Dreamed Adventure (director Valeska Grisebach)

Best Director: (tie) Javier Calvo/Javier Ambrossi for The Black Ball) & Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland

Best Actress: Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto for All of a Sudden

Best Actor: Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne for Coward

Best Screenplay: Emmanuel Marre for A Man of His Time