Cannes 2026: ‘La Gradiva’ Wins Top Critics Week Prize
Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva has won the top award at the 65th edition of Critics Week, the Ami Paris Grand Prize, while Aina Clotet’s Viva (Alive) won the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award.
La Gradiva tells the story group of French high school students goes on a school trip to Naples to discover the ruins of Pompeii and the bodies petrified by Vesuvius. One after another, they let themselves be overwhelmed by desire and anger until they completely surrender to it. The film was co-written by Atlan and Anne Brouillet whose script previously won the Grand Prize at the 2024 Fondation GAN.
Clotet’s Viva is in a near future Catalonia where persistent droughts, mental health deterioration, and promises of life extension are concerns setting up the political agenda, the plot follows 40-year-old woman Nora, who feels the urge to live intensely after overcoming breast cancer and meeting a younger man.
The section is curated by Ava Cahen and runs parallel to the Official Selection, and is dedicated to first and second films. Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, whose film All We Imagine as Light won the competition Grand Prize at Cannes in 2025, presided over the jury of the 65th edition of Critics’ Week.
Dua, the section’s first ever entry from Kosovo, won Blerta Basholli and Nicole Borgeat the SACD Award.
The section opened with an animated film for the first time, In Waves, which was picked up by Netflix, and closed with Félix de Givry’s Goodbye Cruel World, featuring Milo Machado-Graner, the young star of 2023’s Palme d’Or and Academy Award winner Anatomy of a Fall.
Here is the complete list of winners.
Ami Paris Grand Prize
La Gradiva, Marine Atlan
Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award
Viva (Alive), Aina Clotet — award presented to Clotet for her performance in the film
Sony Discovery Prize for Short Film
Skinny Bottines (Skinny Boots), Romain F. Dubois
Gan Foundation Award for Distribution
Wu Ming Nü Hai (A Girl Unknown), Zou Jing — award presented to Pyramide Distribution
SACD Award
Dua, written by Blerta Basholli and Nicole Borgeat
Canal+ Award for Short Film
Vaterland or a Bule Named Yanto, directed by Berthold Wahju
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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