French director Justine Triet became the third female director to win the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or yesterday, beating out 20 other films in competition for the top prize.
Triet used her award speech to criticise how the protest against pension reforms in France ‘has been denied and repressed in a shocking way’ and also called for more room to be made for young filmmakers.
“We have to make room for them, room that I was given 15 years ago in a slightly less hostile world where it was still possible to make mistakes and start again,” she said.
Triet won the prize over veteran directors like Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ken Loach and Wim Wenders, all of whom have at least one Palme d’Or under their belts.
She joins New Zealand’s Jane Campion and France’s Julia Ducournau as only the third woman to have won the competition that this year included a record seven female directors.
The Grand Prix, the second-highest prize after the Palme d’Or, went to British director Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, about a family living next to Auschwitz.
Starring in both winning films was German actor Sandra Hueller, who in Anatomy of a Fall plays a writer who is the main suspect in her husband’s death, while in Zone of Interest she is the wife of the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp.
However, the award for best female actor went to Merve Dizdar, who plays a teacher in an isolated village in Türkiye in Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses.
Best actor went to the renowned Koji Yakusho, who plays a toilet cleaner in Tokyo in director Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days.
This year’s festival was one of the biggest in years in terms of pure celebrity power, with Hollywood legends Harrison Ford, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Isabella Rossellini and Sean Penn all hitting the red carpet.
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