The 2025 Cannes Film Festival has concluded with the announcement of the competition awards, with Jafar Panahi’s crime thriller It Was Just an Accident taking the top prize, the Palme d’Or. With this win, Panahi joins only three other filmmakers – Robert Altman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Henri-Georges Clouzot – as recipients of the main award at the three premier film festivals: Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, and becomes the first Asian director to achieve this feat. He previously won at Venice in 2000 for The Circle, and at Berlin in 2015 for Taxi.
President Juliette Binoche’s jury didn’t stray too far from popular predictions with their slate of award winners, with fellow critical favourites Sentimental Value by Joachim Trier, The Secret Agent by Kleber Mendonça Filho, and Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski also receiving honours (the Grand Prix, Best Director and Best Actor awards, and a shared Jury Prize respectively).
In total, eight competition titles took home at least one prize from the jury, with The Secret Agent’s double win, the ex æquo bestowing of the Jury Prize on both Sound of Falling and Oliver Laxe’s Sirât, and a Prix Spécial for Bi Gan’s Resurrection, one of Cannes 2025’s most polarizing entries. Special awards are presented at the discretion of each festival’s competition juries, and are often considered means of awarding films that garnered passionate support from select jurors without the broad support of the group. Otherwise, this was a fairly conservative, crowd-pleasing selection from Binoche and co.
Other awards presented at the 2025 closing ceremony included the Caméra d’Or for first fiction feature, which went to Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake, and the Short Film Palme d’Or, which went to Tawfeek Barhom’s I’m Glad You’re Dead Now. As Hadi is Iraqi, Barhom Palestinian, and Panahi Iranian, this marks the first time that all three top prizes at the closing ceremony of Cannes have gone to Middle Eastern countries; indeed, every competitive section of Cannes 2025 was won by a filmmaker of colour save the Immersive Competition strand.
Check out all the winners from the 78th annual Festival de Cannes, including all previously announced winners, below.
In Competition
- Palme d’Or: It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
- Grand Prix: Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
- Best Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent)
- Best Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne (The Young Mother’s Home)
- Best Actress: Nadia Melliti (The Little Sister)
- Best Actor: Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent)
- Jury Prize: Sirât (Oliver Laxe) / Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)
- Prix Spécial: Resurrection (Bi Gan)
Un Certain Regard
- Prix Un Certain Regard: The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (Diego Céspedes)
- Best Director: Arab Nasser and Tarzan Nasser (Once Upon a Time in Gaza)
- Best Screenplay: Harry Lighton (Pillion)
- Performance Prize: Cleo Diára (I Only Rest in the Storm) / Frank Dillane (Urchin)
- Jury Prize: A Poet (Simón Mesa Soto)
Caméra d’Or
- Caméra d’Or: The President’s Cake (Hasan Hadi)
- Special Mention: My Father’s Shadow (Akinola Davies Jr.)
Short Films
- Palme d’Or: I’m Glad You’re Dead Now (Tawfeek Barhom)
- Special Mention: Ali (Adnan al Rajeev)
Cinéfondation
- First Prize: First Summer (Heo Ga Young)
- Second Prize: 12 Moments Before the Flag-Raising Ceremony (Qu Zhi Zheng)
- Third Prize: Ginger Boy (Tanaka Miki) / Winter in March (Natalia Mirzoyan)