The 78th Cannes Film Festival wrapped in a whirlwind of emotion, electricity—both literal and metaphorical—and one unforgettable black dress. Just hours before the closing ceremony, the French Riviera’s glittering facade flickered: a city-wide blackout plunged Cannes into darkness, silencing phones, freezing elevators, and turning café espresso machines into relics. Champagne flowed instead—because when life hands you a power outage, you toast in the shadows.
The Palme d’Or didn’t just crown a film; it crowned defiance. Jafar Panahi, Iran’s most celebrated political prisoner-turned-auteur, took the prize for
—a searing tale of revenge that mirrors his own 14-year battle against censorship. The man who filmed in secret, under house arrest, now stood bathed in spotlight, his crew weeping behind him. Panahi’s face? Unreadable as a chess grandmaster’s. His legacy? As sharp as the scissors that once cut his reels in protest.
If the blackout stole the show early, Cate Blanchett reclaimed it in a Louis Vuitton gown that seemed woven from midnight itself. The dress—a cascade of lace and shadow—whispered rather than screamed, its back a masterpiece of architectural drapery. Stylist Elizabeth Stewart had weaponized elegance, proving that even in darkness, a woman in black can outshine a thousand paparazzi flashes.
The night’s irony wasn’t lost on anyone: a festival celebrating
electricity lost the actual kind. Yet the show rolled on, a testament to Thierry Frémaux’s team, who treated the crisis like a misplaced prop—annoying but hardly catastrophic. By curtain call, power returned, the awards were bestowed, and Cannes proved, yet again, that art thrives on unpredictability.
