Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner claimed the top prize at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section Friday, with her grief drama Everytime winning the section’s highest honour at the 79th edition of the festival — a result critics largely called the right call.
Everytime follows a Berlin-based family — teenager Jessie (Carla Hüttermann), her mother Ella (Birgit Minichmayr) and younger sister Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling) — who are about to travel to Tenerife when Jessie sneaks out for a night of partying with her boyfriend Lux (Tristan Lopez) and tragedy strikes. A year on, the survivors make the trip anyway, carrying their grief and unresolved blame into the Spanish sun.
Presenting the award at the Debussy Théâtre, jury president Leïla Bekhti said Wollner’s film depicted “the lived experience of grief,” adding, “it shook us to our core.” Accepting the prize, Wollner told the audience she hoped to “hold on to those quirky and weird thoughts” that creatives often dismiss as too strange, but that “hopefully stay with you a little longer.”
Everytime marks Wollner’s third feature and her Cannes debut. It is a follow-up to The Trouble With Being Born, which earned her acclaim at the Berlinale and San Sebastián. The film features cinematography by Gregory Oke and editing by Hannes Bruun, with Charades handling international sales.
The section’s most commercially prominent entry, Jordan Firstman’s debut Club Kid, went home without a prize. The film had played to thunderous applause on the festival’s opening Friday and sold to A24 for a reported $17 million in a multiple-bidder race — the biggest sale of the festival so far. Critics praised it as a “sweet, surprisingly old-fashioned heartwarmer,” but the jury’s attention landed elsewhere.
The Jury Prize went to Nepalese director Abinash Bikram Shah’s debut Elephants in the Fog, while Louis Clichy’s hand-painted animated feature Iron Boy — acquired by Sony Pictures Classics earlier in the week — took the Special Jury Prize. Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset won Best Actor for Congo Boy, directed by Rafiki Fariala. Three actresses — Marina De Tavira, Daniela Marín Navarro, and Mariangel Villegas — shared the Best Actress prize for Valentina Maurel’s Forever Your Maternal Animal.
The 2026 Un Certain Regard selection ran 19 features in total, six of them first films also competing for the Caméra d’Or. The section’s opening film was Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which won the Queer Palm. The Palme d’Or and main Competition prizes are announced Saturday.
