"We shared the mystery of the unexpected way this film took us through different genres, speaking in a funny, humorous and tender way of no judgement of something so relevant and urgent and so global," Inarritu told reporters after the ceremony.

The film by Diop, the first black female director ever in competition in Cannes, views the migrant crisis from the perspective of Senegalese women left behind after many young men flee by sea to Spain.

The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have already twice won the Palme d'Or, took the best director prize for "Young Ahmed," their portrait of Muslim teenager who becomes radicalized by a fundamentalist imam.

Filho viewed his feverish, violent Western about a rural Brazilian community defending itself from a hard-to-comprehend invasion as a reflection of President Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil.

After it and Noah Baumbach's "The Meyerowitz Stories" — another Netflix release — premiered at Cannes, the festival ruled that all future films in competition needed French theatrical distribution.

And Quentin Tarantino unveiled his 1960s Los Angeles tale "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," with Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, 25 years after the director's "Pulp Fiction" won the Palme d'Or.