Cannes 2025 has come to a close. Now, with a bit of time to reflect, jury member Jeremy Strong is opening up about his experience basking in cinema’s glow for almost two weeks. During the final press conference for the festival (as per Variety), Strong ended up comparing his involvement on the jury to a rather popular film from last year.
“This has been a really wonderful experience,” he said, “a really connected experience with these people — it’s like ‘Conclave’ with champagne. It’s really great.”
This reference was also timely as just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Cannes, an actual new Pope was recently welcomed and honored at the Vatican in Rome. “Conclave,” starring Ralph Fiennes, Isabella Rossellini, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow, follows the church’s Dean of Cardinals as he works to elect a new Pope from a group of vainglorious wheeler-dealers. It went on to win Best Adapted Screenplay at the 97th Academy Awards and went viral on streaming platforms amid the appointment of the new pope in 2025.
At Cannes 2025, the top prize of the Palme d’Or ended up going to Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident.” In discussing this and other films he’d been exposed to during the festival, Strong said, “I feel immeasurably inspired by what I’ve seen here. It’s been so invigorating, and this sort of cumulative tally of the work I’ll carry with me.”
Strong went on to explain that their goal as a jury were to highlight films that they, as a group, “felt were transcendent intrinsically as pieces of work.“ In acknowledging the power of “It Was Just an Accident” and the other films awarded, Strong brought up the playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose work he performed recently on Broadway in “An Enemy of the People,” landing the actor a Tony Award.
“Ibsen talked about, ‘Deep inside, there’s a poem in a poem. And when you hear that, when you grasp that, you will understand my song,’” he said. “And I feel that this film and the other films have these poems within the poem that allow us to grasp something ineffable that have changed me.”
Jury President Juliette Binoche felt similarly about the impact Panahi’s work had on her. Panahi is considered a political dissident in his home country of Iran and has since fled.
“It’s very human and political at the same time because he comes from a complicated country, politically speaking,” Binoche said. “When we watched the film, it really stood out. The film springs from a feeling of resistance, survival, which is absolutely necessary today. So we thought it was important to give this film the paramount award.”
She added, “Art will always win. What is human will always win. Our creative urge can transform the world.”
Other big winners at Cannes include Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” which took home Best Director and Best Actor, and Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” which received rave reviews and a Grand Prix win.
