The Triangle of Sadness wins top prize at Cannes Film Festival 2022

In a decision that took nobody by surprise, the jury of the 75th Cannes Film Festival awarded the Palme d’Or to Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness.

The satirical but savage attack on a world where wealth and privilege hold untrammelled sway over humanity and decency is Ostlund’s second film to win the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize. He had won the Palme d’Or in 2017 for The Square, a no less corrosive take down of the hypocrisies of the art world.

Ostlund is now the ninth director to have won the Palme d’Or twice. He joins a list that has Francis Ford Coppola, Shohei Imamura, Bille August, Emir Kusturica, Michael Haneke, Ken Loach and the Dardenne Brothers.

Earlier in the day, Delhi-based Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes won the 2022 L’Oeil d’Or (Golden Eye) for the best documentary at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, making it two in succession for India. The film was screened as part of the festival’s Special Screenings line-up.

All That Breathes is about two Delhi brothers Nadeem and Saud who, amid the city’s worsening air and deteriorating social fabric, devote their lives to saving migratory black kites that are at the mercy of humankind’s unthinking ways. In January, the documentary won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Sen’s win is India’s second in Cannes in two years. In 2021, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing, which played in the parallel Semaine de la Critique (Cannes Critics’ Week) took home the L’Oeil d’Or.

The best director prize went to Park Chan-wook for his work on Decision to Leave, which marks a clear departure for the Korean director in terms a tone and mood.

The Grand Prix, the prize for the second-best film in Competition, witnessed a tie between 75-year-old French director Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon, set in mid-1980s Nicaragua, and young Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont’s sophomore venture Close, the story of a friendship between two teenage boys.

Korean actor Song Kang-ho was adjudged the best actor in Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Busan-set drama Broker, about a cobbled-together family reminiscent of the one in the director’s 2018 Palme d’Or.

Song Kang-ho had a leading role in Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 Palme d’Or winner Parasite.