Years, a darkly funny and moving drama about a young exotic dancer who becomes involved with the son of a Russian oligarch, won the Cannes Film Festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or.
American director Sean Baker's film beat out 21 other films in competition, including those by established directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and David Cronenberg.
Jurors, including American actress Lily Gladstone and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda, have said they are well aware that their decision could make or break a director's career.
As president of the jury, Barbie director Greta Gerwig praised Anora as an “incredible, humane, human film that captured our hearts.”
Baker's victory has made him one of the leading voices in American independent cinema. She dedicated the film to all sex workers.
“This has literally been my singular goal for the last 30 years, so I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with the rest of my life,” he said, while thanking the film's star, Mikey Madison, as as well as his wife and producer.
Madison plays the title character, who meets Vanya, the immature son of a Russian oligarch with seemingly unlimited money, while working at a strip club.
Vanya, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, hires Anora to be his girlfriend for a week and decides on a whim to take his private plane to party in Las Vegas, where they get married.
That decision upsets his disapproving parents so much that they travel from Russia to make sure he gets an annulment.
The second-place Grand Prix went to All We Imagine as Light, the first Indian entry in 30 years.
It captivated critics with its poetic, monsoon-set portrait of two women who migrated to Mumbai to work as nurses.
Emilia Pérez also won third prize from the jury for its French director, Jacques Audiard.
And a devastating Iranian film about a family torn apart by the country's recent women-led protests, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, received a special jury award for “drawing attention to an unsustainable injustice.”
Its director Mohammad Rasoulof, 51, fled Iran to avoid a long prison sentence just before the festival.
Rasoulof said his heart went out to the film crew, “even under pressure from the secret services in Iran.”
“I am also very sad, deeply sad, to see the disaster that my people experience every day… the Iranian people live under a totalitarian regime,” he said.
The 77th edition of the festival on the French Riviera, which began on May 14, saw several highly charged feminist and political films.
A trans woman won best actress for the first time, as Karla Sofía Gascón took the prize for the bold musical Emilia Pérez, in which she plays a sex-changed Mexican drug boss.
The jury split it between Gascón and his co-stars Zoe Saldana and Selena Gómez, saying they were rewarding the “harmony of sisterhood,” even though only Gascón was at the ceremony.
He dedicated it to “all trans people who are suffering.”
“We all have the opportunity to change for the better, to be better people,” he said.
“If you have made us suffer, it is time for you to change too.”
Meanwhile, there were fewer meaty roles for men this year.
But Jesse Plemons took the award for Yorgos Lanthimos' strange series of short stories, Kinds of Kindness, although he was not present to accept it.
