Ruben Östlund’s social satire Triangle of Sadness has won the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, awarding the Swedish director one of the most prestigious film awards for the second time.
Östlund won the highest honor at Cannes for his film The Square in 2017. Triangle of Sadness, which features Woody Harrelson as the captain of a Marxist yacht and a climate scene of rampant vomiting, pushes satire even further.
“It simply came to our notice then [for people] go out together and have something to talk about, “Östlund said.
“We all agree that the only thing about cinema is that we are watching together. So we have to save something to talk about, but we also have to have fun and entertain ourselves. “
The awards were selected by a nine-member jury led by French actor Vincent Lindon and presented on Saturday at a closing ceremony at the Grand Lumière Theater in Cannes.
The second prize of the jury, the grand prize, was split between the tender children’s drama by Lukas Dhont Close and the romantic thriller by director Claire Denis Stars at Noon.
Earlier, Korean star Song Kang-ho won Best Actor for his performance in the film Broker by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, about a Korean family looking for a home for an abandoned baby.
“I would like to thank all those who appreciate Korean cinema,” said Song, who also starred in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes three years ago.
Best Actress was Tsar Amir Ebrahimi for her role as a journalist on Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, a real-life thriller about a serial killer targeting sex workers in the Iranian religious city of Mashhad. Violent and graphic, Holy Spider was not allowed to shoot in Iran, but instead was made in Jordan. Accepting the award, Ebrahimi said the film represents “everything that is impossible to show in Iran.”
Swedish-Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh won Best Screenplay at Cannes for Boy From Heaven, a thriller set in Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque.
Saturday’s closing ceremony puts an end to a Cannes that has tried to completely resurrect France’s annual extravagance, which was canceled in 2020 by the pandemic and had a modest crowd last year. This year’s festival also took place against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, which sparked red carpet protests and a dialogue on the purpose of wartime cinema.
The Palme d’Or, one of the most prestigious awards in the film, is famously impossible to harm, although bookmakers still do their best. It depends entirely on the deliberations of the jury, which take place in private. Last year, the French body-thriller thriller Titane won the award, making director Julia Decournau the second female filmmaker to win the Palm.
This year’s award for best first film, The Golden Camera, went to Riley Keough and Gina Gammell for War Pony, a drama about the Pine Ridge Reservation made in collaboration with the native citizens of Pine Ridge. ‘Oglala Lakota and Sicangu Lakota.