Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu has won the Palme d'Or at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival for Fjord, a drama centred on a deeply religious family caught between cultural values and state power. The award, presented at a star-packed closing ceremony on Saturday, makes Mungiu only the tenth filmmaker in history to win the festival's top prize twice — his first came in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a landmark Romanian film about illegal abortion under communist rule.
Fjord stars Sebastian Stan and Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve as Romanian evangelical Christians who relocate to a small fishing village in Norway. Shortly after arriving, their children are removed by child welfare services following allegations of abuse linked to the family's use of physical discipline. The film — based on true events — unfolds as a tense confrontation between the family's religious convictions and a Norwegian social welfare system portrayed as rigid and unempathetic. Mungiu has described the film as a story about "left-wing fundamentalism," and in accepting the award told the audience: "This is a message about tolerance, inclusion, and empathy. These are wonderful values that we all cherish, but we need to put them into practice more often." The jury president noted that Fjord "celebrates, in a beautiful and artistic way, diversity in the world."
The Grand Prix, Cannes's second-highest honour, went to Minotaur by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, who lives in exile in France. The film is an allegorical drama following a cynical Russian businessman forced to recruit his own employees for the war in Ukraine, set against a backdrop of state propaganda and fear. Accepting the prize, Zvyagintsev addressed Russian President Vladimir Putin directly in Russian: "Put an end to the carnage — the whole world is waiting for it."
Other major awards reflected the festival's eclectic range of themes. The Best Director prize was shared between Spanish duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi for La Bola Negra, a sweeping political drama about gay life in Spain from the final years of the Franco dictatorship to the present, and Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland, a black-and-white portrait of exiled Nobel laureate Thomas Mann in postwar Germany. Belgian actress Virginie Efira and Japanese actress Tao Okamoto shared the Best Performance award for their roles in All of a Sudden, a tender drama by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. The Best Actor prize was shared by Belgian actors Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne for Coward, directed by Lukas Dhont, a World War I story of a clandestine gay relationship in the trenches.
The Camera d'Or for best debut film was awarded to Rwandan filmmaker Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo for Ben'Imana, a drama dealing with the Rwandan genocide, which she dedicated to "the women of my country." The breadth of this year's winners — spanning war, religious freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, and historical collaboration — underscores Cannes's continued role as a stage not only for cinema but for the political and moral questions defining the present moment.