Panda Wins the 2025 Palm Dog Award at Cannes — And a Look-Alike Accepts

 Lola receives the Palm Dog award on-behalf of the dog named Panda, winner of the award for his best canine performance in the film "The Love that Remains" (L'Amour qu'il nous reste) during the 78th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, May 23, 2025. (Reuters)
Lola receives the Palm Dog award on-behalf of the dog named Panda, winner of the award for his best canine performance in the film "The Love that Remains" (L'Amour qu'il nous reste) during the 78th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, May 23, 2025. (Reuters)
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Panda Wins the 2025 Palm Dog Award at Cannes — And a Look-Alike Accepts

 Lola receives the Palm Dog award on-behalf of the dog named Panda, winner of the award for his best canine performance in the film "The Love that Remains" (L'Amour qu'il nous reste) during the 78th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, May 23, 2025. (Reuters)
Lola receives the Palm Dog award on-behalf of the dog named Panda, winner of the award for his best canine performance in the film "The Love that Remains" (L'Amour qu'il nous reste) during the 78th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, May 23, 2025. (Reuters)

It's called the Palm Dog contest, but Friday's winner of the annual Cannes Film Festival tradition was a Panda.

Panda, though, is an Icelandic sheepdog who stars in “The Love That Remains,” from Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason. Always positioned at the tail end of the festival, the beachside Palm Dog ceremony comes a day before the winner of the festival's Palme d'Or is announced.

Pálmason's tragicomic film, which premiered at Cannes not in competition, follows five characters — Panda included — over the course of a year after the breakdown of a marriage. Panda is ever-present and very much part of the on-screen family and at the heart of the movie. Panda, who retains her name in the film, is Pálmason's dog and stars alongside his real-life children in the movie, which may explain the award-winning performance.

While Panda sadly could not be there to collect the award, a look-alike local pooch was on hand to collect the coveted dog collar along with one of the film's human producers. Panda did make a virtual appearance with an acceptance video, on a car journey through Iceland. She succeeds last year's winner, Kodi, from “Dog on Trial.”

This year’s awards marked the 25th anniversary of the much-loved event. Palm Dog founder Toby Rose explained that it has had more impact that he could imagine, becoming a fixture at Cannes.

“We honor the four-legged here just so they get a bit of their moment before the big dresses and the tuxedos take over,” Rose said.

Other prizes included the “Mutt Moment” Award, for stealing the scene. This went to a long-haired dachshund and a rottweiler, for their roles in raunchy biker drama “Pillion,” starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling.

Finally, the grand jury prize was awarded to mystical Spanish odyssey “Sirât,” for Jack Russell terrier Pipa and Lupita, a Podenco cross. The story follows a father searching for his daughter across the desert, accompanied by his son — and Pipa and Lupita.

Lead actor Jade Oukid was there in person to collect the award alongside director Oliver Laxe. She told the gathered audience that Lupita was her own dog, who had sadly died soon after filming. After the show, Rose added that Lupita would be immortalized with this prize: “We were so happy that we could celebrate a short life.”

The Palm Dog has seen many a famous guest come down to pick up their awards in person. Quentin Tarantino came in person to collect the award in 2019 when Brandy the pit bull in “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood” won. And, in 2021, Tilda Swinton attended the ceremony to pick up the prize when her own three dogs, Rose, Dora and Snowbear, won the award for their roles in Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir II.”

Some dogs have become mini-celebrities in their own right, including Messi from “Anatomy of a Fall.”



Ari Aster Made a Movie About Polarized America. ‘Eddington’ Has Been Polarizing

Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
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Ari Aster Made a Movie About Polarized America. ‘Eddington’ Has Been Polarizing

Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)

A Post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote “Eddington”: “Remember the phones.”

“Eddington” may be set during the pandemic, but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data center is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents — their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data center — are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other’s sense of reality.

“We’re living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is,” Aster says. “Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder.”

“It’s important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird.”

Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films — “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” — have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment.

“Eddington,” which A24 releases in theaters Friday, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the US. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal’s elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream.

At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, “Eddington” dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn’t imagine avoiding it. “To not be talking about it is insane,” he said.

“I’m desperate for work that’s wrestling with this moment because I don’t know where we are. I’ve never been here before,” says Aster. “I have projects that I’ve been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don’t know why I would make those right now.”

Predictably polarizing

“Eddington,” appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster’s film has had one of the most polarizing receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. “I don’t know what you think,” he told the crowd.

Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. “Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries,” wrote The New Yorker’s Justin Chang. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: “Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he’s saying something about America, the joke is on him.”

Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around “Eddington.”

“I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that’s pretty disingenuous,” he says. “In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives.”

For Aster, satirizing the left doesn’t mean he doesn’t share their beliefs. “If there’s no self-reflection,” he says, “how are we ever going to get out of this?”

Capturing ‘what was in the air’

Aster began writing “Eddington” in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn’t start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled “Eddington” as a Western with smartphones in place of guns — though there are definitely guns, too.

“The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I’ve been living with that level of dread ever since,” Aster says. “I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air.”

Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today’s corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like “Eddington,” though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million-budgeted “Beau Is Afraid” struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year’s speculative war drama, “Civil War.”

And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in “Beau Is Afraid,” and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that “it’s very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this.” For Phoenix, “Eddington” offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience.

“We were all terrified and we didn’t fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position,” Phoenix earlier told The AP. “And in some ways it’s so obvious: Well, that’s not going to be helpful.”

‘A time of total obscenity’

Since Aster made “Eddington” — it was shot in 2024 — the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film.

“I would have made the movie more obscene,” he says. “And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we’re living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I’ve seen.”

“Eddington” is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western.

But whatever you make of “Eddington,” you might grant it’s vitally important that we have more films like it — movies that don’t tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn’t sound finished with what he started.

“I’m feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I’m looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?” Aster says. “Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off, or fortressed off, a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to reengage with each other?”