Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 2026 Winners

UK director Clio Bernard has clinched the People’s Choice Audience Award at parallel Cannes section Directors’ Fortnight.

Starring Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo, Daryl McCormack and Lola Petticrew and adapted from the book of the same name by Keiran Goddard, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.

It follows childhood friends Patrick, Shiv, Rian, Oli, and Conor who played together, skipped school together and dreamt of the lives they would have one day, but now they’re thirty, the future they imagined is slipping quietly out of reach.

It marks Bernard’s third time in Directors’ Fortnight after showing Ava & Ali and The Selfish Giant in the section.

Directors’ Fortnight does not have an official jury but launched the People’s Choice Audience Award in 2024. It celebrates the legacy of Chantal Akerman with the €7,500 cash prize supported by the Fondation Chantal Akerman.

The first two winners were Canadian director Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language in 2024, and The President’s Cake by Hasan Hadi which went on to represent Iraq in the Oscars, making it to the shortlist stage.

In other collateral prizes, French director Sarah Arnold’s Too Many Beasts won the Europa Cinemas Label as Best European Film in the selection.

Overseen by the Europa Cinemas network, the prize provides support from the Europa Cinemas Network, with additional promotion and incentives for exhibitors to extend the film’s run on screen.

Set in the French countryside, Too Many Beasts takes its cue from a situation in which wild boards are ravaging crops, prompting open warfare between local farmers and members of a gentlemen’s hunting club, who feed the game between hunts.

Bankrupt farmer Brun shoots the club’s president disappears. A year later, Fulda, a volatile police officer just transferred to the region, leads the investigation. Still struggling after a recent breakup, and as wild boars proliferate across the region, he is pushed to the brink of sanity.

The Cannes Europa Cinemas Label Jury this year comprised Panos Achtsioglou (Olympion Cinema, Thessaloniki, Greece); Octavian Dăncilă (Cinema Victoria, Cluj Napoca, Romania); Alicia Hernanz (Lucernaire, Paris, France) and Māris Prombergs (Kino Bize, Riga, Latvia).

“Too Many Beasts is a really fresh and original début feature. It is a real genre bender, encompassing action, romance, thriller, comedy, police procedural and even some romance,” they said in their statement.

“A big part of its appeal is how the accessible plot consistently takes the audience in totally unexpected directions – and the last fifteen minutes is a delicious and crazy psychedelic fueled roller coaster. It is also a very human film – subtle and not didactic in any way, but it does look at corruption and how communities can come together to find solutions.

French director Shana Pinell’s Shana won the French writers guild SACD’s Coup de Coeur prize reserved for the best French-language film in the selection.

Pinell’s second film after Kiss and Cry, Shana stars her regular collaborator Éva Huault as a woman in her thirties navigating dead-end jobs, drug deals and an impossible relationship with a toxic thug, Moïse. Adding to her woes, her Moroccan Jewish grandmother has just passed away, leaving her with only a family ring with mysterious powers.