The Audience Award celebrates something truly precious: the encounter between a film and its audience. Here, it is neither a jury nor an institution that chooses. It is the audience—the viewers who decided to discover films, sometimes by unknown filmmakers, and who left them feeling moved, surprised, transformed.
Chantal Akerman experienced this here at the Directors’ Fortnight in 1975 with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It was not an easy film, nor one that sought to please. Yet it found its audience—an audience that never left it. This is also why the Foundation chose to support the Audience Award of the Directors’ Fortnight. Chantal Akerman deeply believed that cinema truly exists only at the moment a film is watched, that it is, in a way, completed in the viewer’s gaze.
It is therefore with great pleasure that, on behalf of the Chantal Akerman Foundation, the 2026 Audience Award is presented to the film by Clio Barnard, I SEE BUILDINGS FALL LIKE LIGHTNING. This remarkable film, through the diversity of its actors and the beautiful expression of the bond shared by these five friends from Birmingham—their way of being, of speaking—raises a simple question: “What becomes of friendship when life sends us in different directions?” When one succeeds while the others remain, the filmmaker shows that friendship endures, with difficulty, but the bond holds. Perhaps that is what resonates the most.
