Iranian film wins Palme d'Or at Cannes
Revenge thriller It Was Just An Accident by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who was barred from filmmaking for 15 years by the government in Tehran, has won the Palme d'Or top prize at Cannes.
With the award, Panahi now has the rare honour of winning the top prize at all three major European film festivals, after nabbing Berlin's Golden Bear for Taxi in 2015 and the Golden Lion at Venice for The Circle in 2000.
The 64-year-old director, who last attended the festival in person in 2003, addressed his prize to all Iranians, saying the most important thing was Iran and the country's freedom.
"Hoping that we will reach a day when no one will tell us what to wear or not wear, what to do or not do," he said, in an apparent reference to Iran's strict Islamic dress code for women.
The death in 2022 of a young Iranian Kurdish woman in the custody of the morality police for allegedly violating hijab rules sparked Iran's biggest domestic unrest since the 1979 revolution that brought its clerical rulers to power.
Panahi, who has been imprisoned several times in Iran, plans to return to his country after the festival, he told Reuters.
"Win or not, I was going to go back either way. Don't be afraid of challenges," said the director who made films illegally during the 15-year ban that was recently lifted.
Panahi added that he would never forget his first day at this year's festival, and getting to watch the film with an audience after all those years: "Every moment was thrilling."
It Was Just An Accident follows a garage owner who rashly kidnaps a one-legged man who looks like the one who tortured him in prison and then has to decide his fate. It is only the second Iranian film to win, after Taste of Cherry in 1997.
"Art mobilises the creative energy of the most precious, most alive part of us. A force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life," said jury president Juliette Binoche when announcing why they chose Panahi for the award.
Twenty-two films in total were competing for the prize at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, with entries from well-known directors Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson and Ari Aster.
WITHOUT A HITCH
Saturday's closing ceremony, which officially ends the glamour-filled festival, went off without a hitch after the Cannes area was hit by a power outage for several hours.
Sentimental Value from acclaimed director Joachim Trier received the Grand Prix, the second-highest prize after the Palme d'Or.
The jury prize was split between the intergenerational family drama Sound of Falling from German director Mascha Schilinski and Sirat , about a father and son who head into the Moroccan desert, by French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe.
Brazil's The Secret Agent was handed two awards, one for best actor for Wagner Moura, as well as best director for Kleber Mendonca Filho.
"I was having champagne," said Mendonca Filho after he ran up to the stage again to collect his own award after celebrating the win for Moura, who was not in attendance.
Newcomer Nadia Melliti took home best actress for The Little Sister , a queer coming-of-age story about the daughter of Algerian immigrants in Paris.
Belgium's Dardenne brothers, who have the rare honour of already having won two Palme d'Or prizes, took home the award for best screenplay for their film Young Mothers .
Outside the competition line-up, director Spike Lee brought Highest 2 Lowest starring Denzel Washington to the festival, while Tom Cruise was in town for what could be his final Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning .
Washington, who was only briefly at the festival, received a surprise honorary Palme d'Or on Monday night.
Robert De Niro had received the same honour, which had been announced in advance, during the opening ceremony on May 13.
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Harry Keys collection One of the most powerful stories is told in Chapter 1. A man given the nom de plume of Henry first destroys on his own and later, with Phillips, goes to retrieve parts of a memorial on Ruapehu. He wants the 'backcountry kept clear of this shit. Why do we feel the need to mark wherever we've been?' It's a shocking act but Phillips is alert to the nuances. She writes, 'Were Henry and I undoing history by removing the plaque from the summit? Were we carrying out a radical act of decolonisation? Were we committing an offence? Or were we restoring the environment to its natural state? Perhaps we were doing all of those things, somehow, in a big contradictory mix.' The thing is not to rush to judgment without reading the whole story in this chapter. As she comments, 'Assumptions can be dangerous.' It reads like a short story, full of incident and thought, and like any story you have to get to the end. Phillips salvages remains of the plaque and keeps them safe. She tracks down the grandson of the climber who was memorialised in the 1922 plaque. They meet for coffee. 'I told him the whole story of the trip with Henry, Henry's motives, and my desire to ensure the plaque wasn't consigned to rubbish in Ruapehu.' His response? All good. No problem. 'The plaque was a reflection of the time,' he says. 'I mean, do we really want to keep ramming colonialism down the throats of iwi?' For all of the stories of death and tragedy, Fire & Ice searches out, and finds, stronger feelings inspired by the central plateau: understanding, resolution, peace. The broken plaque and valves on Girdlestone Peak, Ruapehu. Back, once again, and finally, to the Crater Lake, that golden pond, in delicate handcoloured pale turquoise in the photo below, taken about 100 years ago, and positioned in the pentultimate and quite transcendent chapter in Fire & Ice. It's about the 2002 discovery of a skull near Dome peak on Ruapehu. What happened to it? 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Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections Fire & Ice is the second excellent book of the great New Zealand outdoors published in 2025, after Naomi Arnold's account of walking the Te Araroa track in Northbound. Both have been patiently, admirably managed by their respective publishers, with Massey University Press pulling out all the stops to gain access to over 100 archive photos of Ruapehu pulled from the Turnbull Library and other repositories. It's a damned good looking book, destined to be among the year's best, appealing to trampers, mountaineers, climbers, ski-ers, Tongaririo crossers, local iwi and other citizens of the plateau, and really anyone who appreciates an intelligently told natural history. Fire & Ice: Secrets, histories, treasures and mysteries of Tongariro National Park by Hazel Phillips (Massey University Press, $49.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
