THIS year’s Cannes Film Festival jury awarded the Palme d’Or unanimously to Anatomy of a Fall by French director Justine Triet.

It is a poignant and absorbing drama about the wife of a frustrated writer charged with his murder after his death in suspicious circumstances.

While their 11-year-old son tries to make sense of what happened, it is the woman’s way of life that appears to be under examination, more than the question of guilt.

This is an articulate portrait of a woman, passionate and fiercely intelligent, infused with a feminist verve. The French film-maker in her acceptation speech made a political statement in support of the struggles of the French people, for the right to the retirement rights.

“This year the country was shaken by historic and extremely powerful and unanimous protest against pension reform,” said Triet, to a roar of approval from the audience.

“This protest was denied and repressed in a shocking way, with power showing its face in many areas. Socially this was a shocking event, but we can also see it in other spheres of society, including cinema...”

The French Minister of Culture declared herself “flabbergasted” by these “unfair words.” The FIPRESCI Critics’ award and the Jury Prize went to Jewish film-maker Jonathan Glazer for The Zone Of Interest.

Based on the novel by Martin Amis, the family life of Nazi commander Rudolf Hoss proceeds in idyllic normality untouched by the atrocities of the gas chambers taking place just beyond the walls of his lavish residence where, surrounded by a garden of flowers, children play while dark smoke emanates from the chimney of the concentration camps.

It makes for an uncomfortable spectacle, a claustrophobic horror, evoking painful memories and inviting candid reflection on human behaviour.

The Best Actor Award was given to Japanese actor Koji Yakusho for Win Wenders’ Perfect Days.

It is a simple, touching story of a working-class man scraping a living cleaning Tokyo’s public toilets. Warm-hearted and boundlessly touching, this piece of humanist cinema is sharp in its social criticism, yet ultimately mighty in its belief in the decency of ordinary people.

While the actor fills the screen with thoughtful silences, his eyes reflect the amazement and joy to be found in the little things in life.

Wenders follows his activities with obsession and respect. Like a documentary, the film records the details of his daily routine, as he wakes up early, waters his plants, takes his uniform, an old mobile phone, a few coins, and the keys to his van. With devotion, he scrubs one toilet after another.

Then, late one evening, his humble routine is interrupted by an unexpected visit.

Clearly Wenders is not a “provocateur.” He tells the story with a gentle, elegant, poetic touch. The film has a compassionate, romantic view, but isolation, social justice, and solidarity are its backdrop. Poverty is not something that belongs only to less affluent parts of the world but can be found in big modern city like Tokyo.

Sadly, my favourite movie was left empty-handed. Ken Loach’s The Old Oak centres on the last remaining pub in a small village in County Durham that has never recovered from the mine closures of the 1980s. Syrian refugees have just been housed in the village and while the local community disintegrates in reaction to the new arrivals, the Old Oak becomes contested territory.

The village becomes a sort of microcosm of the national mentality, where the inhabitants are the targets of rage and xenophobic resentment, fuelled by the anti-immigration rhetoric of the current Conservative government.

The refugees themselves, meanwhile, are in despair, totally abandoned by the institution. But Loach gives the story a chink of hope, a solution, and some of the residents start to offer their solidarity.

Among the finest films of the festival, it promotes a strong political message that “when the working-class unites, an incredible power emerges, and everything can be transformed.”

Scripted by regular collaborator Paul Laverty, and produced by Rebecca O’Brien, Loach’s movie is a visceral, emotional, and intellectual experience. There is a clarity and severity that takes it beyond a social realism: this is a film with a rigorous transforming stare, driven by extraordinary and passionate urgency.

Moving and forceful, it was the only film whose grace and lyricism merit the status of a classic.

If Loach’s movie offers hope, Finnish film-maker Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves, winner of the Jury Prize, presents a pessimistic view of labour exploitation. It’s a harsher vision whose story hinges on the precarious insecurity of working conditions.

Ansa works in a supermarket under an exploitative contract, and part of her job is to dispose of expired food until, one day, she is fired for trying to take home an out-of-date sandwich.

She finds love in a karaoke bar where she meets construction worker Holappa, but soon Holappa’s depressive tendency to hit the bottle leads him too to lose both his job, and Ansa.

Kaurismaki’s modern social satire kind-heartedly employs deadpan humour and rock music to rescue the viewer from absolute despair. It is a graceful, pure, deeply humanist work that celebrates the working class, tough despite its limpid beauty.

This year’s Cannes festival has been one the festival’s strongest and most political editions for some time, with a strong international perspective and so many stories in which the ordinary and the outcast were given the spotlight.