Palme D’Or: Dheepan
Grand Prix: Son of Saul
Jury Prize: The Lobster
Best Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Best Actor: Vincent Lindon
Best Actress: Rooney Mara and Emmanuelle Bercot
Best Screenplay: Michel Franco (Chronic)
Camera d’Or (Best first feature): La Tierra Y la Sombra
The refugee drama tells the story of people fleeing post-civil war Sri Lanka for a life in France.
Holocaust drama Son of Saul took the Grand Prix. Vincent Lindon won Best Actor while Rooney Mara and Emmanuelle Bercot shared Best Actress.
Dheepan tells of a former Tamil Tiger fighter who links up with two strangers to pretend to be a family and find a life of asylum in a tough, drug-infested housing estate on the edge of Paris.
Director Jacques Audiard, who previously made A Prophet and Rust and Bone, said: “To receive a prize from the Coen brothers is something pretty exceptional. I’m very touched. I’m thinking of my father.”
Joel Coen said: “This isn’t a jury of film critics. This is a jury of artists who are looking at the work.”
The Grand Prix, essentially the runner-up prize, went to Hungarian newcomer Laszlo Nemes for Son of Saul and its depiction of the Auschwitz, gas chambers.
“This continent is still haunted by this subject,” Laszlo Nemes said.
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos took the jury award, the third prize, for The Lobster, a dystopian comedy starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz.
Best Director went to Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien for martial arts film The Assassin, his first movie in eight years.
Rooney Mara shared Best Actress for her role in Carol, but her co-star Cate Blanchett was overlooked and instead the jury decided to honor Emmanuelle Bercot for her role in My King.
Vincent Lindon’s Best Actor award was for his role in Stephane Brize’s movie The Measure of a Man.
There were 19 in-competition films this year, though several were aired out of competition, including Mad Max: Fury Road and Pixar’s Inside Out.
According to new reports, the Cannes Film Festival is not allowing women into screenings if they are wearing flat shoes.
Film producer Valeria Richter, who has part of her left foot amputated, says she was stopped at the Cannes Film Festival for not wearing high heels.
Valeria Richter, who was eventually allowed in, spoke after Cannes was accused of turning away women in flat shoes.
The festival has denied heels are part of the official dress code.
A spokeswoman said ushers had been “reminded” of this, suggesting women in flat shoes would now be admitted.
However, numerous festival-goers have reported seeing women being turned away.
Among them was Asif Kapadia – whose Amy Winehouse documentary premiered in Cannes last weekend – who said his wife had been stopped on the red carpet but was “eventually let in”.
Although Valeria Richter was eventually granted entry, she said “many of my colleagues who can’t wear heels were rejected and did not come in”.
Festival director Thierry Fremaux has said “rumors” of a ban on heels were “unfounded”.
Writing on Twitter, Thierry Fremaux said: “For the stairs, the regulations have not changed: <<No smoking, formal wear>>. There is no mention of heels.”
The row is awkward for Cannes in a year when it was seeking to address sexism in cinema.
The festival opened with a female-directed film for the first time since 1987, and organizers have endorsed a series of Women in Motion talks by stars such as Isabella Rossellini and Salma Hayek.
The film, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, tells the story of two women having an illicit romance in 1950s New York.
Carol – based on a 1952 novel by Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley – is winning rave reviews for its lead performances.
Cate Blanchett denied speculation suggesting she drew on her own early gay relationships to create the role.
The actress said: “In 2015, the point should be: who cares?”
Carol, directed by Todd Haynes, follows the blossoming relationship between a glamorous married woman (Cate Blanchett) and an impressionable shop girl (Rooney Mara).
Last week, double Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, 46, reportedly admitted to Variety magazine that she had had many female partners.
However, at a news conference in Cannes, the actress was quick to scotch reports of a gay past.
Carol is seen by some critics as a companion movie to Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, about an illicit romance between a white woman and a black man, also set in the 1950s.