For the first time in its 78-year history, the Cannes Film Festival gave out two Honorary Palme d’Ors during a single edition. One went to Robert De Niro at the opening ceremony. The other, awarded on short notice, went to Denzel Washington before the world premiere of Highest 2 Lowest.
That last-minute decision says something about the festival’s weight. Cannes does not hand out its top honorary prize on a whim. The fact that it did — that organizers scrambled to put a gold palm in Washington’s hands — suggests the festival understood something. It understood that the event, for all its glamour, is also a platform. A stage where the world watches. And Washington, like De Niro, is a figure who commands that stage.
The main competition jury was led by French actress Juliette Binoche. She presided over a selection that ultimately gave the Palme d’Or to Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi for his thriller It Was Just an Accident. Panahi is no stranger to risk. He has been arrested, banned from filmmaking, and imprisoned by Iranian authorities. That a filmmaker under such pressure won the top prize at the world’s most prestigious film festival is not incidental. It is the point.
This festival ran from 13 to 24 May 2025. The official poster featured Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant from Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, a film that won the Palme d’Or at the 19th Cannes Film Festival. The poster was designed by Hartland Villa. It was a deliberate nod to heritage. But heritage alone does not explain why Cannes matters.
What matters is what the festival chooses to show and who it chooses to honor. On 16 April 2025, Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna was killed. She was one of the main subjects of the documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk by Sepideh Farsi. The festival screened that documentary. It did not look away from Hassouna’s work or her death. It put her story in front of an international audience. That is the stakes piece. Cannes is not simply a red carpet. It is a place where filmmakers and subjects risk everything — their freedom, their lives — to tell stories. And the festival, by selecting those stories, says they matter.
French actor Laurent Lafitte hosted the opening and closing ceremonies. He brought charm. But charm is not the story. The story is that a festival that could have coasted on nostalgia — on posters of old films and honorary awards to legends — instead gave its top prize to a filmmaker who makes movies under threat. It gave a second honorary Palme to an actor whose new film premiered at the festival. It screened a documentary about a photojournalist killed two months before the festival began.
That is not coincidence. That is curation. And curation, at a festival of this scale, is a statement.
The 78th Cannes Film Festival did not pretend to be above politics. It did not pretend that film exists in a vacuum. The prizes, the posters, the last-minute honors — all of it added up to a single message. Cannes is not a retreat from the world. It is a lens on it. And the people who make films — from Panahi to Farsi to Washington — are the ones holding that lens steady.
What is at risk is not the festival’s reputation. That is secure. What is at risk is the idea that cinema can still speak to power. That a thriller from a banned Iranian director can win the top prize. That a documentary about a killed photojournalist can screen on the Croisette. That an actor honored on short notice can stand on that stage and remind everyone why the stage exists.
Cannes did not invent those risks. It just refused to ignore them.
