Women Winners @ Cannes 2026 – Diane Carson reports
The 79th Cannes Film Festival award ceremony held the evening of May 23m 2026, began on a high note with presenter Geena Davis noting that women have truly made advances in the filmmaking world. Smiling, she pointed to this year’s official poster, a tribute to director Ridley Scott’s and screenplay writer Callie Khouri’s Thelma and Louise which premiered May 1991 at Cannes. There self-assuredly sit Geena Davis/Thelma and Susan Surandon/Louise atop the front seats of their iconic 1966 Ford thunderbird convertible, the car in which they escaped, at least for a while, patriarchal power. Honoring the film’s thirty-five year anniversary, the poster celebrates the pair’s enduring friendship, their challenge to male dictates, and assertion of their power. The gun poking out of Thelma’s back pocket recalls the violence they confronted as they redefined the female protagonist. Louise’s strong, direct address to the camera complements Thelma’s gaze off screen, her sunglasses and tousled hair adding an exclamation point. Davis’ acknowledgment of the importance of this image of women’s assertive independence elicited applause before the ceremony proceeded. But, Davis commented that, with so much to offer, women filmmakers’ integration into the world of cinema still needs improvement.
Proof of the impressive global talent of women writers and directors followed immediately as Canadian filmmaker and president of the Camera d’Or Jury Monia Chokri presented the Camera d’Or/Golden Camera award for the best first film to Rwandan writer/director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo resented the Camera d’Or/Golden Camera award for the best first film to Rwandan writer/director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo for Ben’Imana. Adding prestige, the Camera d’Or goes to the best first feature across all Cannes’ sections, including films in the Official Competition, the Directors’ Fortnight, and the Critics’ Week. Ben’Imana screened in the Un Certain Regard section. Adding to this honor, Ben’Imana also won the FIPRESCI Prize (the International Critics’ Prize).
The first Rwandan feature included in the Cannes Film Festival, Ben’Imana details the 2012 reconciliation and healing efforts addressing the 1994 Hutu militia’s genocide of Tutsis. Accepting the Camera d’Or, Dusabejamgo dedicated her film to the women’s stories represented in Ben’Imana, adding, “I wanted to pay tribute to the women of my country — women who, through horror, found the strength to stand up with dignity, to forgive, and to move forward, even painfully.” At the post-awards press conference, Dusabejambo said that for years she worked to tell this story, to portray Rwandan culture.
Not long after that, German director Valeska Grisebach won the Prix du Jury/Jury Prize for Das Geträumte Abenteuer/The Dreamed Adventure. In a beautifully generous gesture, Grisebach insisted that her star Yana Radeva come on stage with her to accept the award, describing Radeva as essential to her filmmaking. At her portion of the post-awards press conference, Grisebach described the inspiration behind The Dreamed Adventure as the women in Eastern Europe facing that particular situation. Saying she realized, “I had so many blind spots,” Grisebach pursued the aftermath of the post-1989 time period, after the Berlin Wall fell, during times of resistance, communism collapsing, and “the strong versus the weak” on the Bulgarian border town of Svilgrad. Grisbach’s tour-de-force presentation of a multifaceted society dramatically and empathetically peels away the layers of “people with lives so different from ours.”
In another powerful pairing, the two actresses in writer/director Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Soudain/All of a Sudden shared the best actress award. This is a fitting acknowledgment of the pas-de-deux that Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto present as Marie-Lou (Efira) directs the affairs of an elderly care facility into which attempts to introduce Humanitude, an approach that actively involves residents, respecting their dignity. Mari (Okamoto) arrives with a terminal cancer but constructive participation, befriending Marie-Lou and introducing new procedures. The infectious joy of Efira and Okamoto in sharing the acting award reinforced the kindness that defines their screen characters. Both agreed that the message they wanted to send was that “the way to save yourself is through helping someone else.”
Another prize-winning director, Austrian Sandra Wollner, won the Un Certain Regard Prize for Everytime. Probing the effects of a family tragedy, a mother, her daughter, and her teenage son agree to share a family retreat to Tenerife to confront their overpowering grief. Segueing into experimental territory feels exactly right for this poignant exploration of the aftermath of trauma.
Finally in the women’s awards ledger, another actress team won the Un Certain Regard best actress award for performances in Forever Your Maternal Animal. Shared by Daniela Marin Navarro who plays Elsa, Mariangel Villegas as Elsa’s younger sister Amalia, and Marina de Tavira as their mother Isabel, this formidable group dynamically interacts in Forever Your Maternal Animal. Their intensity and authenticity interpret confrontational relationships as powerful emotional and physical experiences. Their implosive and explosive performances deserve the honor accorded all three.
Even though the percentage of women directed films and those films anchored in female characters is disproportionally low, the awards testify to extraordinary talent. Here’s hoping that in the very near future there are even more candidates for recognition.
