Dawn Images

Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi won the Palme d’Or top prize at the Cannes film festival on Saturday, using his acceptance speech to urge his country to unite for “freedom”.

The latest film from the 64-year-old, It Was Just an Accident, tells the tale of five ordinary Iranians confronting a man they believed tortured them in jail.

The core of the provocative and wry drama examines the moral dilemma faced by people if they are given an opportunity to take revenge on their oppressors.

Panahi, who was banned from making films in 2010 and has been imprisoned twice, used his own experiences in jail to write the screenplay.

“Let’s set aside all problems, all differences. What matters most right now is our country and the freedom of our country,” he told the VIP-studded audience on the French Riviera.

The leading light in the Iranian New Wave cinema movement has vowed to return to Tehran after the Cannes Festival, despite the risks of prosecution.

When asked on Saturday evening if he was worried about flying home, he replied: “Not at all. Tomorrow we are leaving.”

Iran was shaken by the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests in 2022, sparked by after the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for allegedly flouting dress rules for women.

The demonstrations were quashed in a crackdown that saw thousands detained, according to the United Nations, and hundreds shot dead by security forces, according to activists.

Politics

Panahi has won a host of prizes at European film festivals and showcased his debut film The White Balloon in Cannes in 1995 which won an award for best first feature.

The head of the Cannes 2025 jury, French actress Juliette Binoche, paid tribute to It Was Just an Accident.

“This is a film that emerges from a place of resistance, a place of survival, and it felt essential to bring it put it on top today,” she told reporters afterwards.

Iran’s state IRNA news agency hailed Panahi’s award, which is the second for an Iranian director.

“The world’s largest film festival made history for Iranian cinema,” it reported, recalling the first win in 1997 by Abbas Kiarostami, who was also banned and jailed.

Panahi has always refused to stop making films and his efforts to smuggle them out to foreign distributors and film festivals has become the stuff of legend.

A year after being handed a 20-year ban on filmmaking in 2010 he dispatched a documentary with the cheeky title This is Not a Film to the Cannes Festival on a flash drive stashed in a cake.

“I’m alive as long as I’m making films. If I’m not making films, then what happens to me no longer matters,” he told AFP this week.

Iraqi director wins best feature debut

Hasan Hadi, the first filmmaker from Iraq to be selected for the Cannes Festival, won a top prize for his childhood adventure under economic sanctions in The President’s Cake.

His first feature-length film follows nine-year-old Lamia after her school teacher picks her to bake the class a cake for President Saddam Hussein’s birthday or risk being denounced for disloyalty.

It is the early 1990s, the country is under crippling UN sanctions, and she and her grandmother can barely afford to eat.

The pair set off from their home in the marshlands into town to try to track down the unaffordable ingredients.

Hadi dedicated his Camera d’Or award, which honours first-time directors, to “every kid or child around the world who somehow finds love, friendship and joy amid war, sanctions and dictatorship.

“You are the real heroes,” he said.

The President’s Cake has received excellent reviews since premiering last week in the Directors’ Fortnight section. Cinema bible Variety called it a “tragicomic gem”.

Deadline said it was “head and shoulders above” some of the films in the running for the festival’s Palme d’Or top prize, and “could turn out to be Iraq’s first nominee for an Oscar”.

Palestinian films

Also from the Middle East, Palestinian director Tawfeek Barhom received his award for his short film I’m Glad You’re Dead Now.

After giving thanks, he took the opportunity to mention the war on Gaza.

“In 20 years from now, when we are visiting the Gaza Strip, try not to think about the dead and have a nice trip,” he said.

US President Donald Trump sparked controversy this year by saying he wanted to turn the war-ravaged Palestinian territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Outside the main competition, Gazan twin brothers Arab and Tarzan Nasser on Friday received a directing award in the Certain Regard parallel section for Once Upon A Time In Gaza.

One of them dedicated the award to Palestinians, especially those living in their homeland of Gaza, which they left in 2012.

He said that, when they hesitated to return to Cannes to receive the prize, his mother had encouraged him to go and tell the world about the suffering of people in Gaza.

“She said, ‘No, no, no, you have to go. Tell them to stop the genocide’,” he said.

Amnesty International last month said Israel was carrying out a “live-streamed genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza, claims Israel dismissed as “blatant lies”.

Fairytale

Among the other Cannes awards, Brazil’s Wagner Moura – best known for playing Pablo Escobar in Narcos – picked up the best actor award for his performance in police thriller The Secret Agent.

Its director, Kleber Mendonca Filho, also won the best director prize, making it a good evening for Brazil.

France’s Nadia Melliti continued her fairytale fortnight in Cannes by clinching the gong for best actress.

Melliti, who had never appeared in a film before, plays a 17-year-old Muslim girl struggling with her homosexuality in Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister.

The keen football player of Algerian descent was spotted by a casting agent near a shopping mall in central Paris.

Sentimental Value by Norway’s Joachim Trier, a moving family drama given a 19-minute standing ovation on Thursday, picked up the second prize Grand Prix.

Sabotage

Saturday’s closing ceremony was the final act of a drama-filled day in Cannes that saw the glitzy seaside resort suffer a more than five-hour power cut.

The outage knocked out traffic lights and had visitors and locals scrambling for paper money because cash machines were out-of-order and restaurants were unable to process card payments.

Local officials said a suspected arson attack on a substation and vandalism of an electricity pylon had caused the disruption.

“Who is going to do my hair? There’s no electricity, oh my God, I’m like in a panic attack,” Mahra Lutfi, Miss Universe UAE, told AFP as she prepared to walk the red carpet.

German director Mascha Schilinski joked that she had “had difficulty writing her speech” because of the black-out as she accepted a special jury prize for her widely praised “Sound of Falling”.