The New Yorker:

The festival served up its richest edition in years, with multiple standouts among the twenty-two films in contention for the Palme d’Or.

By Justin Chang

When the competition program of the seventy-eighth Cannes Film Festival was announced several weeks ago, I wasn’t alone in predicting that the Iranian director Jafar Panahi would win the Palme d’Or, the event’s highest honor, for his new film, “It Was Just an Accident.” When I saw the film in Cannes last week, I felt more certain than ever. In the past two decades, Panahi, like many of his countrymen and fellow-artists, has faced continual persecution by the Iranian government: he has been detained and imprisoned, placed under house arrest, forbidden to leave the country, and banned from filmmaking. He has circumvented this last restriction numerous times, with great courage and ingenuity. Today, living in Tehran, he is a free man, a free artist, and, yes, a Palme d’Or winner; he was in Cannes to pick up his prize on Saturday evening, at the most thrilling and moving closing ceremony I can remember.

Panahi’s well-earned triumph capped off one of the strongest editions of the festival in years. You could see the richness of the selection reflected in the wide range of prizes handed out by the competition jury, presided over by the actor Juliette Binoche. Ranking all the films in the competition, from best to worst, has become something of a tradition lately, and never have I struggled more with the task. Assigning an order of preference imposes a useful discipline, in that it forces a commitment to a reaction in the moment; by the same token, it can also feel both arbitrary and provisional. I look forward to seeing many of these films again, if and when they play at other festivals and/or open in U.S. theatres in the coming months, and to discovering things about them that I may have missed the first time.

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