Cannes Announces Winners of the 77th Film Festival & Surprise Palme d'Or

Summary

The 77th Cannes Film Festival saw a mix of surprise winners, with Anora taking home the prestigious Palme d’Or.
Sean Baker’s film Anora garnered attention for its deep emotion and realistic portrayal of sexuality, diverging from his usual casting choices.
Amidst the celebration, Baker emphasized the importance of preserving the communal experience of watching films in theaters.

The 77th Cannes Film Festival has announced its list of winners, and it’s quite a surprising collection. No single film swept, with the great Jacques Audiard’s film Emilia Perez being the only title to win multiple awards. That movi stars Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz, and is considered one of the most divisive movies to premiere at Cannes. Perhaps the biggest surprise, though, was the Palme d’Or given to Anora, a screwball romantic comedy imbued with a dose of deep emotion. That film comes from Sean Baker, the acclaimed filmmaker behind The Florida Project, Red Rocket, and Tangerine. This is the first American film to win the Palme d’Or since 2011’s The Tree of Life.

Baker is famous for having an impeccable eye for casting non-actors, something which added to the authenticity and beauty of his previous films. That changes in Anora, which stars Mikey Madison of Better Things and 2022’s Scream. She portrays a stripper who catches the eye of a wealthy Russian oligarch who wants her all for himself. Like Baker’s other movies, Anora does not hold back when it comes to realistic sex scenes and sexuality; his last film, Red Rocket, was led by a porn star (in a phenomenal performance), and Tangerine starred L.A. sex workers. Anora appears to be the apotheosis of his meditation on the socioeconomics of sex.

“This literally has been my singular goal as a filmmaker for the past 30 years, so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my life,” Baker said in his acceptance speech, adding:

“But I do know I’m going to fight for cinema because right now, as filmmakers, we need to fight to keep cinema alive. This means making feature films intended for theatrical exhibition. The world has to be reminded that watching a film at home while scrolling through your phone checking emails and half paying attention is just not the way — although some tech companies would like us to think so.”
“Watching film with others in a movie theater is one of the great communal experiences, we share laughter, sorrow, anger, fear and hopefully have a catharsis with our friends and strangers — and that’s sacred. So I say the future of cinema is where it started, in a movie theater.”

Anora received a whopping 10-minute standing ovation after it premiered, one of the longest of the festival, and it looks like that translated to award gold. You can watch Sean Baker’s speech in the X thread below, courtesy of Deadline.

This year’s Cannes jury was led by actor and director Greta Gerwig (Barbie, Lady Bird), and consisted of more actors than usual: Lily Gladstone (The Unknown Country, Killers of the Flower Moon), Omar Sy (Lupin, The Intouchables), Ebru Ceylan (Winter Sleep, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), Juan Antonio Bayona (the director of The Society of the Snow, The Impossible), Eva Green (The Dreamers, Kingdom of Heaven, Proxima), Hirokazu Kore-eda (the director of Shoplifters, Broker, Nobody Knows), Nadine Labaki (Caramel, Capernaum), and Pierfrancesco Favino (Padrenostro, The Unknown Woman). Greta Gerwig announced the Palme d’Or win in this way:

This particular film, this incredibly human and humane film that captured our hearts, made us laugh, let us hope beyond hope and then broke our hearts and never lost sight of the truth.