Cannes 2018: Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda wins the Palm d'or

Asian, Arab, and women filmmakers scored big at the closing ceremony of the 71st Cannes Film Festival, while Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda took home the top prize -- the Palme d'Or.

Kore-eda, in the festival's main competition for the fifth time, won the Palme d'Or for 'Manbiki Kazoku' (Shoplifters), a deeply felt film about a cobbled-up family existing on the margins of society and fighting to prevent itself from imploding.

Kore-eda is only the second Asian Palme d'Or winner this millennium (after Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul for 'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives', 2010). This is the seventh time that a director from Asia has bagged the coveted trophy.

Spike Lee's engaging, feisty anti-racism period drama 'BlacKkKansman', the true story of an African-American police detective who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs in the 1970s, won the Grand Prix, while Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki's neorealist Beirut street life tale Capharnaum earned the Jury Prize.