The Slow Cut Quarterly Volume V · Issue 03 — After Cannes 79 22 June 2026 Now reading
Critic's notebook · long letter · 79th edition

Letter from the Croisette
— what stayed
after Cannes 79.

A week-old report from the festival's last seat, addressed to a younger critic who couldn't make it this year. On Cristian Mungiu's second Palme for Fjord, on what the Lumière sounded like in its final thirty seconds, and on whether seven straight Neon wins now describes the cinema or only the distributor.

Daria Gerchikov

Contributing critic, The Slow Cut Quarterly · Berlin / Paris
Twelve consecutive Cannes editions covered, 2014–2026 · author of The Patient Frame (Verso, 2023)

Paris · 22 June 2026 · filed from Rue de Charonne, 11ᵉ · running time of read: 16 min

21
Films in competition
Théâtre Lumière
02
Palmes d'Or now held
by Cristian Mungiu
10
Directors in history
to win the Palme twice
07
Years in a row Neon
has distributed the Palme
79
Edition of the festival
closed on 23 May 2026

— Inside this letter

  1. § 01The room at the end of FjordLetter
  2. § 02The prize list, orderedTable
  3. § 03The festival in five actsTimeline
  4. § 04Mungiu at the press roomQuote
  5. § 05Three films beside the trophiesCards
  6. § 06What you'll write to ask meFAQ
§ 01 — The letter

The room at the end of Fjord, and what walked out with us.

Dear Kote,

You should have been here. I keep writing that sentence and crossing it out because it sounds like a reproach, and it isn't — it's only that the cinema this year had the kind of weight that a description doesn't quite reach, and when something has that weight I always want the people I argue with most honestly in the room with me. The festival closed nearly a month ago now, on the twenty-third of May, and I have spent the time since then in a small, stubborn argument with myself about whether the prizes were right, which is the wrong question, and about what each of the four films I loved was doing to the others by sitting next to them in the line-up, which is the only question worth carrying back to Tbilisi.

Let me start at the place I keep coming back to. It is the last thirty seconds of Fjord, the second screening at the Lumière, the one with the international press still in attendance — which means the kind of audience that has been trained, painfully, not to react until the credits roll. Cristian Mungiu had let the camera sit, for I want to say four minutes but it might have been three, on a Norwegian living room with the boy finally back in it: a wide composition, slightly under-lit, the parents not touching each other and not touching him, the social worker still inside the frame on the right edge with her coat folded over her arm. And what I remember — what I keep telling people about in cafés on the way home and finding they don't quite believe — is the sound the room made. It was the sound of two thousand people deciding, simultaneously, not to breathe out until the lights came up. Not silence. Held breath. There is a difference, and Mungiu has been making films for two decades that know exactly what the difference is.

So yes, he won. His second Palme d'Or — the first was 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in 2007, and what is striking is how much further the new film has travelled from his Bucharest hospital-corridor period without losing the central instinct: the patient, unrescued long take, the camera that does not console the audience. Fjord is a Romanian family of evangelical Christians who have moved to Norway for work, whose youngest child is taken into care by the Norwegian social welfare service, and whose case becomes — over a hundred and sixty-eight minutes — the slow tectonic collapse of everything that held them together before they ever crossed the border. Sebastian Stan is the father, in a performance that I think will surprise the people who only know him from the Marvel armature, and Renate Reinsve, who Norwegians at the festival kept slightly proprietorially claiming as theirs, is the case worker. Reinsve does not play her as a villain. That is the cruellest thing the film does, and the most necessary.

Mungiu is the tenth director in the festival's history to win the Palme twice — a list that you can recite by heart because we used to recite it together: Coppola, Imamura, Bille August, Kusturica, the Dardennes, Haneke, Ken Loach, Kore-eda, Östlund, and now him. It is not exactly a club one enters lightly. What it means in practice — what I think it will mean — is that the next Mungiu film, whatever it is, will be financed before he has finished the treatment, and that no European producer with any sense will turn down a meeting with him for the rest of his working life. He has said in interviews this past week that this is precisely what worries him; he is forty-eight years old and has fifteen, maybe twenty, films left in him, and the easier the money becomes the more carefully he will have to guard the slowness that is the only thing he has ever done well. I believe him. I believe him because Fjord is not the film of a man collecting prizes, it is the film of a man working out, in public, what he owes to a kind of family he has met but does not belong to.

The Grand Prix went, you will have seen, to Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur. Andrey was working in exile this time — I do not want to write more about his circumstances than he himself has, because he is careful, but the film is Georgian-Latvian co-production money and was edited in Riga and you can feel the geography of its making in every long shot of empty corridor. Minotaur is, on the surface, a chamber piece: a man, a woman, a son, a building with a labyrinthine plan, a missing father. Underneath it is the most direct thing Zvyagintsev has made since Leviathan, and it is direct in the way only a film made in real exile can be — without the protective irony of Loveless, without the symbolist scaffolding of his earlier work. The jury, I am told by someone who would know, debated for an additional half-day over whether Minotaur should have taken the Palme, and the deciding argument was that Fjord was the better cinema and Minotaur was the more necessary statement and that those are two different prizes. They were right.

❦

About Coward, Lukas Dhont's third feature, and the strange shared Best Actor it produced — Valentin Campagne and Emmanuel Macchia, both of them, jointly — I want to be honest with you and say I am not yet sure. Dhont is a director I have argued with myself about since Girl, and Coward is his most assured work; it is a Belgian film about two young men in conscript military service in a country that does not, in fact, have conscription, which is a beautifully blunt way of saying that the film is a parable and is content to be one. The performances are very fine. The screenplay is very nearly excellent. What I cannot quite settle is whether Dhont's particular gift for staging adolescent tenderness is starting to congeal into a manner — into something he can produce on demand — or whether I have simply seen him three times in a row now and am tired of being moved on the same beats. I would like your reading when it opens in Tbilisi, which I am told will be late September through the Mubi window.

The Best Actress was split between Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, both for Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden, which is — I will say it plainly — the most graceful failure of the competition. Hamaguchi has been working at such a sustained level since Happy Hour that to call any of his films a failure feels almost rude; what I mean is that All of a Sudden wants to be three things at once (a Tokyo office drama, a Paris hotel-room two-hander, a meditation on how time accelerates in late marriages) and only fully becomes the middle one, which is itself extraordinary, and the jury, sensibly, gave its prize to the two actresses who carry that middle hour. Efira speaks French and broken Japanese; Okamoto speaks Japanese and very good French; the languages meet across a hotel bed in a scene that I think will be taught in directing classes in fifteen years.

And Pawlikowski. Paweł, sharing Best Director with the Javiers — Calvo and Ambrossi, for the Spanish ensemble piece The Black Ball — for his Fatherland, which I will write you a separate letter about because it deserves one. For now I will only say that he has gone back to monochrome, that the film is a ninety-six-minute argument with his own Cold War, and that it is the work of a sixty-eight-year-old man who has stopped trying to be photographed beautifully and started trying to photograph the country he was born in honestly. The two are not the same project. Anyone who has seen the new film knows this.

The other thing I owe you, before this letter gets any longer, is the conversation everyone in the press village kept circling back to without quite committing to in print. Neon has now distributed the Palme d'Or for seven consecutive years. Seven. Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, Anora, last year's winner, and now Fjord. That is not a coincidence and it is not even, exactly, a strategy; it is a kind of quiet stranglehold on the way American audiences encounter European cinema, achieved by a distributor who has been better than anyone else at reading the festival's centre of gravity for the better part of a decade. I do not know yet whether to find this admirable or worrying. Both, I think. The thing I keep coming back to is that the streak is not distorting the prize — Mungiu would have won it from any jury this year, with any distributor in the room — but it is starting, very subtly, to shape what American distributors believe is worth fighting for. We will have to watch.

You will write back and ask me, I know, whether I think Cannes is still the festival, given Venice's recent insistence on getting there first with the American films, and Berlin's quieter year, and Locarno's growing confidence with the directors who used to be Cannes's discoveries. My honest answer, after twelve editions: yes, but only because of weeks like this one. The festival is the festival when the films are the films. The Croisette is a postcard that the cinema occasionally inhabits. This year it was inhabited.

With love and the usual exhaustion, — D.

§ 02 — The prize list

The official awards of the 79th Festival de Cannes.

Prize Film Director Country Note
Palme d'Or Fjord Cristian Mungiu Romania His second Palme; the tenth director in festival history to win twice. Sebastian Stan & Renate Reinsve, 168 min.
Grand Prix Minotaur Andrey Zvyagintsev Russia / exile Co-produced through Latvia and Georgia; edited in Riga. The director's first competition entry in eight years.
Best Director Fatherland Paweł Pawlikowski Poland Shared, jointly. Monochrome, 96 min. Pawlikowski's first film since 2018's Cold War.
Best Director The Black Ball Javier Calvo & Javier Ambrossi Spain Shared, jointly. Ensemble piece, twenty-four named speaking parts; a Madrid family wedding seen across three decades.
Best Actress All of a Sudden Ryusuke Hamaguchi Japan / France Shared between Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, for performances that move between Japanese and French across three acts.
Best Actor Coward Lukas Dhont Belgium Shared between Valentin Campagne and Emmanuel Macchia. Both unknown at the start of the festival; both will not be by Christmas.
Jury Prize The Tin House Alice Rohrwacher Italy Her third visit to the official jury since 2014. A film about an abandoned brickworks in the Marche, ninety minutes, no soundtrack at all.
Best Screenplay Tehran, Repeating Saeed Roustaee Iran Filmed without permits over fourteen non-consecutive nights. A father–daughter screenplay built as four telephone calls and one face-to-face.
Caméra d'Or Salt Light Mariam Petrosyan Armenia A first feature, shot on Super 16 in the Lori region. Awarded across all parallel sections — a first for Armenian cinema.
§ 03 — Five acts

Twelve days in May, told by the films that landed each one.

01 Days 1 – 2
13 – 14 May 2026

The opening, slightly underweight.

The festival began, as it often does now, with a French opener that was received politely rather than warmly: Cédric Klapisch's Le Quartier, an ensemble piece about a Marseille apartment building. The Croisette was still empty by midnight. Two of the early press conferences were under-attended in a way that suggested the year would be a working one, not a celebrity one — which, as it turned out, was exactly the right tone for what was coming.

By the second evening the room had begun to settle. There is a particular sound that the Lumière acquires by Day 2 — a hum of cleared throats and re-tightened scarves — that I have come to read as the festival beginning, properly, to listen.

02 Days 3 – 5
15 – 17 May 2026

The midweek shift — when the festival had a centre.

On the morning of the fifteenth Hamaguchi screened All of a Sudden, and from that point the conversation in the press village locked itself into the language it would speak for the rest of the week. People began, cautiously, to talk about a strong year. Virginie Efira gave a press conference in which she said almost nothing and made the room laugh four times.

Pawlikowski's Fatherland arrived on the sixteenth. It was ninety-six minutes long, monochrome, and the second-to-last press screening filled forty minutes before the lights went down. By the seventeenth the festival had its first internal debate of the year — between people who thought the Pole would take the Palme and people who were waiting on the Mungiu, which had not yet shown.

03 Days 6 – 8
18 – 20 May 2026

The fulcrum — Mungiu, and the room recognising itself.

Fjord screened first in competition on the evening of the eighteenth, the press screening on the morning of the nineteenth. I was at the second. There is no useful way to write what those two hundred and ninety-six minutes — across two viewings — did to the festival's air, except to say that by the evening of the nineteenth no critic on the Croisette was bothering to argue whether the Palme was settled, only by how much.

Zvyagintsev's Minotaur arrived on the twentieth. He did not attend the press conference; a representative read a short statement. The film answered for him.

04 Days 9 – 10
21 – 22 May 2026

The late surprises and the tired arguments.

The two days before the ceremony are always strange. The big films have shown; the smaller ones are still finding their reviewers; the jury is in the Hôtel Martinez doing whatever juries do behind a thick door. This year Rohrwacher's The Tin House made its slow, quiet ascent through the consensus on Day 9 — a film I had walked into bored and walked out of holding very still — and Roustaee's Tehran, Repeating finally received the long review-essays it had deserved from the start of the week.

The annual argument about the Russian situation came back, this time slightly less heated than in 2022 — Zvyagintsev's exile-credit list had, I think, taken some of the air out of it.

05 Days 11 – 12
23 – 24 May 2026

The ceremony, the awards, the long drive home.

The closing ceremony, on the night of the twenty-third, ran a quarter of an hour long. Mungiu accepted the Palme in Romanian and finished in French. He thanked Reinsve, then Stan, then the social worker in the Norwegian city that had given the production its locations, then his wife of twenty-three years, then — last — the audience of the second press screening, which is the audience he said had told him the film was finished.

By the morning of the twenty-fourth most of us were on the early train to Paris. There were two films I still have not seen, and I will catch them in Karlovy Vary in July and write you about them then.

§ 04 — From the press room

Mungiu, an hour after the ceremony, on winning twice.

The first one taught me how to finish a film.
The second one is going to teach me how to keep refusing to.
Cristian Mungiu · Closing-ceremony press room, Palais des Festivals, 23 May 2026, 23:48 local time
§ 05 — Beside the trophies

Three smaller films from Cannes 79 worth flying for.

Un Certain Regard

Forty Acres

R. J. Cyler · United States · 104 min

Cyler's directorial debut after a decade of supporting roles, a film about an inherited piece of land in rural Mississippi and three siblings who arrive at the same week with three different ideas about what to do with it. Shot on 35mm by Tobias Schliessler, with a score from the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire that drops in and out like weather. The performances are unforced; the camera waits.

The moment A storm rolls in during the second act and the soundtrack drops, completely — twelve minutes of rain on a tin porch roof, three actors saying nothing, one bottle slowly emptying. The kind of patience you only earn by trusting your audience.
Directors' Fortnight

A Field, In Iceland

Hlynur Pálmason · Iceland · 117 min

Pálmason follows a meteorological station crew across one summer and one winter on the eastern coast, and gradually narrows the film until the weather itself is the protagonist. There is a long-running joke about a missing measuring tape that becomes, by the end of the second hour, the quiet load-bearing detail of the whole thing. A film about competence, mostly, which is a subject very few films have any patience for any more.

The moment A four-minute shot of a lighthouse beam crossing a kitchen wall, while two characters who have not spoken to each other for two scenes finally do. Filmed in one take, the second attempt of the night.
Critics' Week — Short

Two Letters, One Address

Aiko Kurosawa · Japan · 28 min

A short film I keep mentioning to people and finding they have not seen — a problem the Critics' Week sidebar suffers every year. Kurosawa is twenty-six years old, has worked as Hamaguchi's continuity supervisor on the last three productions, and her debut as director is a quiet, beautifully-organised conversation between two postcards arriving on the same morning at a Kyoto address, one delivered late and one delivered early. Twenty-eight minutes that should be ninety; she will be in competition by 2028.

The moment The cut between the second postcard being read aloud and the first postcard being written, twelve years earlier. Two actresses, both unnamed in the credits; both miraculous.

A prize streak can flatter the festival; it can also quietly redirect what the rest of the year fights for.

— the argument of this letter, in one sentence —
§ 06 — Letters you will send back

Six questions a younger critic is allowed to ask without apology.

Why is Mungiu's second Palme historically rare?

Because the Palme d'Or, since 1955, has been awarded seventy-nine times and only ten directors hold two of them. The list is short and almost entirely European: Francis Ford Coppola (1974, 1979), Shōhei Imamura (1983, 1997), Bille August (1988, 1992), Emir Kusturica (1985, 1995), the Dardenne brothers (1999, 2005), Michael Haneke (2009, 2012), Ken Loach (2006, 2016), Hirokazu Kore-eda (2018, returning soon), Ruben Östlund (2017, 2022), and now Mungiu (2007, 2026). It is rare because directors who win once tend either to be recruited away by larger industries — Coppola is the obvious case — or to evolve in a direction the festival's particular taste no longer recognises. Mungiu has done neither.

What is the Mungiu–Stan–Reinsve combination doing for the film's commercial chances?

More than the prize itself, frankly. Sebastian Stan brings a North American audience who would not otherwise sit through a hundred and sixty-eight minutes of subtitled domestic-court drama; Renate Reinsve brings the post-Worst Person in the World audience that the festival has trusted to read European casting since 2021. Neon has already announced an awards-season release: limited US opening on 25 September, expanding by 9 October. Expect Stan to be in serious Best Actor conversation by November, and the film itself in the Best International race by the end of the year.

What is Neon's actual track record?

Seven of the last eight Palmes — every one since 2019 except 2025, when no Neon-distributed film was in the line-up of finalists. The full run: Parasite (2019), Titane (2021), Triangle of Sadness (2022), Anatomy of a Fall (2023), Anora (2024), and Fjord (2026). There was no Palme in 2020. What is quietly remarkable is not the streak as a coincidence but the fact that Neon has been negotiating the right of first refusal on roughly forty international titles per year for the past five — a strategy that other distributors are now, finally, starting to imitate.

How long is Fjord and where can I see it?

168 minutes, with one intermission left in for European distribution and removed for the US theatrical cut. In Georgia it will open through Cinema House Tbilisi from 2 October 2026, with a Mubi streaming window opening in the second week of January 2027. In France it is already in cinemas: it opened on 11 June and is at the Reflet Médicis and the MK2 Beaubourg in Paris, with subtitles in French only for the Romanian dialogue and in Norwegian-with-French for the social services scenes. See it in a cinema if you can. It is a film whose sound design only fully exists at theatre volume.

Did Minotaur really deserve the Grand Prix?

Yes, and the question is more interesting than the answer. The Grand Prix at Cannes has historically been the prize given to the film that the jury wanted to honour as a major work but did not feel was the cleanest piece of cinema in the room; it is the second prize because it is the more difficult one. Minotaur is the film of a director who has had to rebuild his entire production apparatus in exile, and the fact that it is even structurally coherent — let alone as composed as it is — is its own kind of argument. The jury, I think, recognised that.

What is worth flying to Locarno for, after this?

Three things. First, the new Lav Diaz, which is allegedly four hours shorter than the last one and therefore — by his standards — a chamber piece. Second, the retrospective on Marguerite Duras's late work as a director, which Locarno has been quietly preparing for eighteen months. Third, and most importantly, the parallel sidebar programme, which is where the next Mungiu, the next Hamaguchi, the next Pawlikowski are coming from — they always are, and Locarno's programmers know this better than anyone else's. Book the flight. Bring two notebooks. Tell me what you find.