The Square, a Swedish- and English-language comedy, unexpectedly won the biggest award at the 70th Cannes Film Festival, the coveted Palme d'Or. Sofia Coppola was another big winner as she became the second woman in the festival's history to take Best Director. Coppola won for The Beguiled, a reimagining of a 1971 film based on a novel by Thomas P. Cullinan, about a wounded Union officer in the Civil War who is found by residents of an all-girls boarding school. It stars Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, and Colin Farrell. The first and only other female director to take the honors as best director at Cannes was the Soviet director Yuliya Solntseva, who won in 1961 for her World War II film The Story of the Flaming Years.
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