Canneseries Season 9 Unwrapped
Jisoo & the Madame Figaro Rising Star Award
The moment Jisoo stepped onto the CANNESERIES pink carpet, it was clear this wasn’t going to be an ordinary award evening. The BLACKPINK star and now actor — known internationally for Snowdrop and her expanding screen career — received the Madame Figaro Rising Star Award, one of the festival’s most coveted honour prizes. Her presence brought a wave of energy that felt entirely of the moment: the intersection of K-pop’s global cultural authority and prestige television’s hunger for new stars. The crowds on the Croisette were, predictably, ecstatic.
It’s also a signal of where the festival’s ambition points. CANNESERIES doesn’t just programme great television — it programmes conversations. And Jisoo’s arrival in Cannes was one of the loudest the Palais has hosted in April.
Richard Gadd Returns — Harder
After Baby Reindeer rewrote the rules of autofiction on screen, the pressure on Richard Gadd’s follow-up was immense. Half Man — his new series for BBC & HBO — premiered its first episode here in Cannes, hors compétition, with Gadd in attendance alongside director Alexandra Brodski and cast members Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson. The series follows two men across thirty years of friendship, violence, and the particular fragility of masculine bonds, set between Glasgow in the 1980s and the present day. Jamie Bell co-stars.
Uncompromising, bruised, and built with the same unflinching intimacy that made Baby Reindeer so difficult to look away from — Half Man is television that insists on being felt.
The Weight of Engagement
The Konbini Prix de l’Engagement is awarded each season to a figure who moves the conversation well beyond the screen. This year it went to Richard Gadd — recognising his fierce and ongoing advocacy against sexual violence, both in his work and in his public life. The ceremony, moderated by Delphine Rivet, was one of the festival’s most charged moments.
Gadd accepted alongside the Half Man team — a reminder that awards like this land differently when the work they honour is rooted in lived experience. CANNESERIES gave this one the weight it deserved.
Full prize list → canneseries.com/recompenses
The Season’s Undeniable Sweep
Alice and Steve didn’t just win the evening — it owned it. Sophie Goodhart’s British comedy for Disney+, starring the extraordinary pairing of Nicola Walker (The Split, Annika) and Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords), took home Best Series, the Special Interpretation Award for its entire cast, and the Prix des Lycéens. Three prizes from one series, on a world premiere.
The premise is deceptively simple: Alice is devastated when her best friend Steve begins dating her 26-year-old daughter. What follows is a comedy of escalation — threats, sabotage, total war — that disguises something far more searching about friendship, loyalty, and the particular terror of being replaced. Walker and Clement, directed by Tom Kingsley, reportedly struck sparks from the very first read.
When Ensemble Chemistry Becomes Its Own Award
The Special Interpretation Award going to the full cast of Alice and Steve says something about what the jury recognised: this wasn’t the triumph of one extraordinary performance, but of an ensemble operating at a frequency where every scene crackles. Walker brings the kind of escalating, controlled fury that makes comedy feel urgent. Clement is her perfect counterweight — patient, warm, increasingly cornered.
A world premiere at CANNESERIES, a triple prize — Disney+ acquired a season winner before it had aired a single episode anywhere in the world. That is what a festival premiere in Cannes can still do.
Barcelona Without the Postcard
The Best Screenplay went to I Always Sometimes — written by Marta Bassols, Marta Loza and Almudena Monzú for Movistar Plus+ (in collaboration with Suma Content, the production company of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi). The original title Yo Siempre A Veces already tells you something about the register: a young single mother in Barcelona, a weeklong love story, a child born into ambivalence. Ana Boga carries the series with a performance that is, by all reports, genuinely extraordinary.
This is Barcelona as it rarely gets filmed — in the shade, unglamorous, real. A first international premiere at CANNESERIES Season 9, distributed internationally by Movistar Plus+ International.
A Score That Earns the Summer
Swedish series Summer of 1985 — original title Svärtan — took Best Music, with the jury recognising Jonas Wikstrand’s score. The premise reads like a finely tuned genre machine: a teenager found drowned near a mythical Swedish island, a group of friends who uncover something ancient and inexplicable, and a friendship slowly unmade by grief and jealousy. Directed by Björn Stein and Amy Deasismont, produced by Media Res Studio and sold internationally by Fifth Season, this world premiere is the kind of series — supernatural, generational, visually stunning — that crosses age demographics effortlessly.
Borgerhout’s Most Vital Export
BOHO is a Belgian short-form series set in Borgerhout — Antwerp’s proudly multicultural district — and it arrives with exactly the energy the name implies. Created by Abbie Boutkabout, the series follows Kima, Nawal, and Alex: three women in their thirties navigating dreams, family expectations, and each other. Lead performer Serine Ayari — comedian, singer, stand-up — delivers what the jury’s programming notes call an astonishing blend of dance, humour, and emotional weight.
Best Short Form Series at CANNESERIES is one of the more competitive prizes on the palmarès. BOHO wins it by being the kind of series that simply feels alive in a way that formal craft alone can’t manufacture.
When Reality Outpaces Fiction
Directed by Lennart Stuyck, The Deal With Iran takes a bomb plot near Paris and follows the thread all the way into the geopolitical machinery that surrounds it — clandestine networks, political pressure, hostage diplomacy. In three episodes of 52 minutes each, it unravels what the festival’s own programming notes called a “reality that always exceeds fiction.” The timing is not accidental. The resonance with current global affairs is, the makers would note, the entire point.
Produced by Diplodokus, distributed by Espresso Media, airing on VRT canvas — and now with CANNESERIES’s Best Docuseries prize to its name.
Hugo Blick, Bill Nighy & an English Caravan Park
Hors compétition and all the better for it — California Avenue is Hugo Blick’s new BBC series, and it is quietly extraordinary. Set in 1975 in an isolated English caravan park, its sun-bleached tranquillity is shattered by the arrival of two women who wake up dormant family secrets. Blick brings Bill Nighy, Helena Bonham Carter, Erin Doherty and Tom Burke to a corner of English rural life rarely seen on screen — and shoots it, the programming notes say, plan after plan, with the kind of poetic tenderness that leaves you wanting more.
Nighy’s presence at the Palais des Festivals, taking questions on a story this delicate and strange, was one of the festival’s quieter highlights. Cannes does loud very well. California Avenue reminded it that it can also do still.
Chamoux Builds Again
A world premiere in the Rendez-Vous section: Chamouxland: La Reconstruction is Camille Chamoux‘s return to her CANAL+ universe — a 52-minute comedy that sharpens its blade on everyday sexism, wellness culture, gender performance, and the enthusiasm with which society dresses up its norms as choices. Trad-wives, manifestation, and the ordinary injunctions of femininity: Chamoux dissects them all. An all-star French cast joins her — Camille Cottin, Karin Viard, Fadily Camara among them. The conversation that followed the screening was, by all accounts, as sharp as the writing.
CANNESERIES Season 9 confirmed something we’ve been watching build for several years: this festival is no longer a warm-up act before Cannes Film Festival. It is its own gravitational centre. The range of what it holds — Alice and Steve‘s British comic precision, Half Man‘s raw Scottish grief, BOHO‘s Antwerp vitality, Summer of 1985‘s Swedish supernatural atmosphere, Jisoo’s global pop culture electricity — doesn’t dilute the identity of the event. It is the identity. Cannes turns pink in April because television is where some of the boldest storytelling alive is happening, and CANNESERIES has built the space where that gets celebrated, argued about, and seen first. The best festivals don’t just programme content. They curate a sense of what’s possible. Season 9 did exactly that.
Full list of winners: canneseries.com → Récompenses · Full official selection: canneseries.com → Sélection Officielle
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