“It was an embarrassment of riches this year in terms of cinema,” said Greta Gerwig, president of the jury at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. “We (the jury) could have been talking into next week.”
The top prize, the Palme d’Or, went to Sean Baker’s Anora, a dark romantic comedy about a stripper who falls for the son of a Russian oligarch. He loves her enough to marry her, to his family’s dismay. Chaos follows. It stars Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn.
Gerwig said the jury “really led with our hearts for everything we watched.” Anora, she said, reminded them of a classic, with structures of Lubitsch and Howard Hawks, “It did something truthful and unexpected.” Every performance won them over. “We were invited to be on a journey, it was heart-forward in terms of choosing,” she said.
A prize for the ensemble
The best actress award went to the whole female ensemble of Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez: Karla Sofia Gascon, Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz. “Women together, that’s something we wanted to honor when we made this award,” Gerwig said. “Each of them is a standout, but together transcendent.”
The competition that year also included Demi Moore’s comeback in the horror film The Substance and Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million passion project Megalopolis.
Business and the jury
Netflix took North American and UK rights to Emilia Perez for a high seven-figure sum. With Anora, the US distributor NEON won its fifth Palme d’Or in a row.
Gerwig’s fellow jurors were Turkish screenwriter and photographer Ebru Ceylan, US actress Lily Gladstone, French actress Eva Green, Lebanese director Nadine Labaki, Spanish director Bayona, Italian actor Pierfrancisco Favino and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda.
The festival ran from May 14 to May 25, 2024. When Cannes named Gerwig jury president in the run-up, she was 40, the youngest person to lead the jury since 1966, and fresh from the success of Barbie. Festival president Iris Knobloch and general delegate Thierry Fremaux backed the choice. Gerwig, from Sacramento, California, had also directed Lady Bird and Little Women.
