The awards ceremony for the 2017 Cannes Film Festival took place on Sunday, culminating with a Palme d’Or win for Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s satire The Square, Variety reports. But the most satisfying win may have been Sofia Coppola’s Best Director award for The Beguiled: She is only the second female director in the festival’s 70-year history to win the award. The last time that happened, the award went to Soviet director Yuliya Solntseva for her World War II film The Story of the Flaming Years—in 1961. Coppola also has the distinction of being the first woman to win Best Director who attended the festival as a child the year her father’s film won the Palme d’Or; here she is looking adorable in 1979, when Apocalypse Now and The Tin Drum shared the award. (Her 8th birthday fell during the festival that year.)
Coppola’s film, an adaptation of Thomas Cullinan’s Civil War novel about a wounded Union officer who is found by the residents of an all-girls boarding school, stars Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, and Colin Farrell and looks fantastic. (Don Siegel directed his own adaptation starring Clint Eastwood in 1971.) Kidman also received a special award in honor of the festival’s 70th anniversary; she appeared in four films that screened at Cannes this year, two of which were in competition.
Palme d’Or winner The Square, about a conceptual art exhibit that descends into chaos, stars Danish actor Claes Bang and features Elisabeth Moss and Dominic West. The Grand Prix went to BPM, Robin Campillo’s film about the French gay rights struggle focusing on ACT UP–Paris, while Loveless, Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s story of a couple whose child goes missing, won the Jury Prize. Best Screenplay was a tie between The Lobster screenwriters Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou and We Need to Talk About Kevin writer/director Lynne Ramsay for The Killing of a Sacred Deer and You Were Never Really Here, respectively. Acting awards went to Diane Kruger for In the Fade, her first German-language starring role, and Joaquin Phoenix for You Were Never Really Here.
This year’s feature films jury was headed by writer/director Pedro Almodóvar and included writer/director Maren Ade, actress Jessica Chastain, actress Fan Bingbing, actress/writer/director/singer Agnès Jaoui, writer/director Park Chan-wook, actor/singer Will Smith, writer/director Paolo Sorrentino, and composer Gabriel Yared.
