And the Palme d’Or is awarded to… Here is our ideal list of winners from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival

Selection Since a prize list is necessarily subjective, “the New Obs” does not resist temptation and grates on politeness to Greta Gerwig and her jury to award her favorites of the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival.

22 films are in competition. Who among Jacques Audiard, Mohammad Rasoulof, Andrea Arnold… will succeed Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” and win the 77th Palme d’Or in the history of the Cannes Film Festival? While awaiting the choice of the jury chaired by Greta Gerwig, “le Nouvel Obs” draws up its ideal list of winners.

• Palme d’Or : “The seeds of the wild fig tree” by Mohammad Rasoulof

Rumors made it the favorite for the Palme, especially since the flight from Iran of its director, Mohammad Rasoulof, after his sentence to eight years in prison and the confiscation of his property in early May. We confirm: the film, intelligently programmed on the last day of the festival, is great. It does not have the flamboyant modernity of “Emilia Perez” by Jacques Audiard, to whom we could also have given the supreme award in the absence of an incontestable masterpiece. We even prefer the more lyrical “A Man of Integrity” by the same Rasoulof, winner of the Un Certain Regard prize in 2017. But this claustrophobic dive into the home of an official of the Iranian dictatorship, whose two young daughters are won over by the movement “Woman, Life, Liberty”, is a relentless representation of the autocratic, absurd and murderous system of the mullahs, which is corrupting Iranian society. How did Rasoulof manage to film such an indictment on site, clandestinely? The achievement, politically heroic and cinematically powerful, well deserves a Palme.

• Grand Prize: “The Most Precious of Goods” by Michel Hazanaviciurand s

Also presented at the end, the animated film from the director of “The Artist” (male performance prize for Jean Dujardin in 2011) is a marvel. Adapted from the eponymous tale by Jean-Claude Grumberg, it retraces the destinies of a baby thrown from a train leaving for the camps, of the couple of old lumberjacks who take him in and raise him in the middle of the forest, and of his father in the hell of Auschwitz. Or the Shoah told to (grown-up) children with a moving grace and modesty which does not prevent some nightmarish paintings worthy of Munch or Hieronymus Bosch. The beautiful sobriety of the animation contrasts with the music of Alexandre Desplat, successful but sometimes invasive, in this film with inspired visions, dubbed by Dominique Blanc and Grégory Gadebois (replacing Gérard Depardieu, whose voice was removed). Add to this the narration by the tired voice of Jean-Louis Trintignant at the twilight of his life and the resurrection of a Yiddish lullaby (“Schluf Je Iedele”), sung by Marie Laforêt, on the mute faces of future victims of the Nazi abomination. When he initiated it five years ago, Hazanavicius certainly did not hope that this plea against anti-Semitism would encounter such worrying news. It has all the makings of a future classic that will be shown in schools.

• Female Actor Award: Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón in “Emilia Perez” by Jacques Audiard

It’s a truly infernal trio: the man who became a woman, his lawyer and his wife, in this song and dance fresco by Jacques Audiard against a backdrop of drug traffickers and redemption. They are unique and complementary, all three very invested and omnipresent. Rewarding only one of them would be unfair. And even though the competition saw many important female roles, we only see Mikey Madison in “Anora” to beat them to the post. Stripper, lover, belligerent: it’s true that she alone is worth three…

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• Male Actor Prize: Sebastian Stan in “ The apprentice » by Ali Abbasi

Visible transformation, evolution of the character from big baby to corrupt cynic, the hair increasingly stiff, the paunch more and more opulent: the incarnation of Donald Trump in his young years by the American of Romanian origin Sebastian Stan , known until now to be the Winter Soldier of Marvel productions, is more than perfect. And disturbing. Otherwise, Ben Wishaw in “Limonov, the Ballad” plays the bad guy with ease and also endures impressive physical transformations over more than forty years.

• Jury prize: “Anora” by Sean Baker

Fun, fine and uninhibited, this supercharged epic about a young stripper and the son of a Russian oligarch has everything that we regret that American independent cinema no longer is: lucid portrayal of the era, love characters, accuracy of characters and ad hoc actors. For his second participation in the competition after “Red Rocket”the American Sean Baker, champion of sex workers and others forgotten by the American dream, has more than delivered.

• Best Director Award: “Bird” by Andrea Arnold

Failing to agree on Paolo Sorrentino, in the running for “Parthenope”or on the Romanian Emmanuel Parvu for “Three Kilometers Before the End of the World”we crown the British Andrea Arnold, usually subscribed to the Jury Prize (she won it in 2006 for “Red Road”in 2009 for “Fish Tank” and in 2016 for “American Honey”). Wouldn’t it be time to give it access to that of staging? Because it is thanks to her intuitions as a director that this new story of adolescent emancipation in the English fourth world, this airy film about a grim reality, escapes the kitsch symbolism of its animal parable.

• Screenplay prize: “All we imagine as light” by Payal Kapadia