79th Cannes Film Festival Unwrapped
Twelve days, the Croisette in May, the Palais des Festivals in its annual reign. The 79th Festival de Cannes returned to its core question — what cinema can still do when given the room — and answered it with a palmares that rewarded patience, formal command, and the kind of acting that doesn’t need to announce itself. Bulbul was on the ground for the full run: at the premieres of La Bola Negra, Roma Elastica, and Histoires de la Nuit; inside the booths and conference halls of the Marché du Film; and — when the Palais finally settled into its last evening of the year — inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière for the closing ceremony, reporting live from the room as the envelopes opened and Cristian Mungiu’s name was called. This is what we saw, what we heard, and what it tells us about the year ahead in film.
The Palmarès
Full results on festival-cannes.com →
Mungiu’s Fjord — patience as an aesthetic.
Cristian Mungiu’s return to the Croisette after R.M.N. was always going to be watched closely. Fjord — a glacial chamber piece on a remote Norwegian inlet, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve — turned out to be exactly the kind of film the festival was built to honour: precise, unforgiving, completely uninterested in seducing its audience. The Romanian master’s relocation to a Nordic register feels less like a reinvention than a sharpening.
Reinsve, six years on from The Worst Person in the World, delivers what may be the year’s most internal performance; Stan, working entirely in counterweight, holds the room. The Palme was widely expected. It was also earned.
Romania / Norway · Drama · 132 min
Minotaure: Zvyagintsev returns.
Andrei Zvyagintsev’s first feature since Loveless arrived without the heavy publicity that usually surrounds a major Russian director’s return. The film is better for it. Minotaure is exactly what its title suggests — a labyrinth, allegorical, claustrophobic, and built around a central performance that the jury reportedly called “the most precise piece of physical acting in the competition.”
The Grand Prix gives Zvyagintsev a second Cannes win and confirms what many in the room had been waiting to feel: he hasn’t lost a step.
Los Javis sharpen the blade.
Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — Los Javis to anyone who has followed Spanish television over the past decade — bring their unmistakable pop-surrealist hand to a darker register here. La Bola Negra, with Penélope Cruz at its heart, holds the door open to genre without ever quite stepping through. The Best Director (ex æquo) prize confirms what the festival’s programmers seem to have understood: Los Javis are no longer the bright young thing of Spanish television. They are now formal filmmakers of consequence.
Cruz’s performance — bruised, contained, almost ceremonial — is the kind of work that arrives twice a decade.
Macchia & Campagne — Coward
Lukas Dhont‘s follow-up to Close hands two newcomers — Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne — the kind of role most actors wait a career for: a brotherhood collapsing under unspoken expectation. Their shared Best Actor (ex æquo) prize is the most generous reading of an ensemble performance the Cannes jury has handed down in years.
Efira & Okamoto — Soudain
Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s first French co-production — Soudain — pairs Virginie Efira with Tao Okamoto in a study of two women caught in adjacent griefs across two continents. Hamaguchi’s signature stillness, transplanted to Paris, found its perfect rhythm. Two actresses, one prize, completely deserved.
The panel behind the palmarès.
The 2026 jury delivered one of the most cohesive verdicts in recent memory — rewarding restraint over spectacle and ensemble over individual showmanship across nearly every category. Two ex æquo acting prizes in a single year is, in itself, a statement of taste.
Three premieres, three rooms, three very different films. Here is what we saw from inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière.
La Bola Negra Premiere
The premiere of La Bola Negra was one of the most charged of the festival. Penélope Cruz arrived to an extended standing ovation; the room had already read the early international reaction by then and knew what it was watching. Cruz plays a woman keeping a thirty-year secret, and the film’s central image — a black ball passed between hands — works as both narrative engine and tonal warning.
The Best Director ex æquo for Los Javis was confirmed less than a week later. The film, by then, was already being aggressively positioned by sales agents across the Marché.
Histoires de la Nuit (Birthday Party) Premiere
Marketed internationally as Birthday Party and released in France under its native title Histoires de la Nuit, this nocturnal moral tale — set across one birthday party that refuses to end — was always going to be one of the most discussed films of the festival. The reunion of Monica Bellucci and Benoît Magimel on screen had been four years in the rumour mill.
The premiere delivered everything the building had been waiting for. Every conversation at the after-screening glass was about craft — the cinematography, the controlled tonal slide, Bellucci’s near-silent third act. A film that should travel a long way.
Roma Elastica Premiere
Marion Cotillard returned to the Croisette with Roma Elastica — a sprawling, ambitious, deliberately overstuffed portrait of contemporary Rome held together by what she does with stillness. The film’s structural risks divide; the central performance does not.
The room understood, as it usually does in Cannes, that what it had just watched would be discussed for the rest of the year — and likely for some time after that.
Marché du Film — where the films actually move.
Two festivals run in parallel every May on the Croisette: the one with the red carpet, and the one behind the curtain. The Marché du Film — the world’s largest film market — is the second, and for any agency serious about cinema it is also the more decisive. This is where international rights get sold, where independent acquisitions are negotiated, and where distribution maps are drawn for the year ahead. This is where the film business actually happens.
We were on the Marché floor as participants, not observers — in the keynotes, walking the Riviera and Lerins booths, taking meetings on positioning, sales decks, premiere PR and acquisition strategy. This is the territory where Bulbul’s integrated PR and marketing practice for film sharpens itself.
Premiere & Red Carpet PR
Press strategy and execution around festival premieres — accreditation, talent management, post-screening flow, regional coverage rollouts.
Local & International Press Campaigns
Multi-market PR launches for theatrical and streaming releases — calibrated press kits, embargo management, journalist outreach.
Sales-Stage Positioning
Branding, sales materials and positioning narratives that help films land with international distributors during Marché and beyond.
Acquisition Strategy
Brand work for production companies and acquisition labels — communication that signals editorial taste before commerce.
Beyond the photographs, beyond the editorial coverage — the moments themselves. Inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière, on the carpet, at the post-premiere ovations. Tap any card to play.
Fjord
La Bola Negra
Histoires de la Nuit
Roma Elastica
Karma
El Ser Querido
Paper Tiger
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Elsewhere on the Croisette: Léa Seydoux and Catherine Deneuve at the Gentle Monster activation — a generational handshake that briefly froze the carpet; a fortieth-anniversary celebration of Thelma & Louise at the Cinéma de la Plage that drew a crowd well past midnight; and quiet mornings at the Grand Théâtre Lumière where the day’s competition film was about to start its long climb into the international conversation.
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The closing ceremony at the Grand Théâtre Lumière was — as it usually is in years where the palmares has clear conviction — quietly emotional. By the time Mungiu had thanked his crew and Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve had walked off with the Palme, the room had already settled into the recognition that this was a year where the festival had done its primary job: pointing at the year ahead in film, in advance.
Cannes 79 reminded us — across the carpet, the competition, and especially the Marché — that the power of storytelling has not diminished. If anything, it has sharpened. In a year where audiences are more fragmented than ever, the films that travel furthest are still the ones that know exactly what they want to say and refuse to dilute it. Fjord, La Bola Negra, Soudain, Histoires de la Nuit — each was a study in editorial conviction.
The other lesson is structural. The Croisette is no longer a closed industry conversation. It is now the start of a year-long PR and distribution operation that runs through every market, every release window, every digital surface. For films, that operation is the difference between a Cannes premiere remembered and a Cannes premiere forgotten. That’s where Bulbul comes in.
Full official selection: festival-cannes.com → The Selection · Full winners list: festival-cannes.com → Winners · Marché du Film →
© 2026 Bulbul — All photographs and video used in this article are the exclusive property of Bulbul and are protected by copyright and related rights; all rights reserved; any reproduction, distribution, public display, or adaptation, in whole or in part, without Bulbul’s prior written consent is strictly prohibited.
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