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The film "The Lobster" by Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos won the special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

His success makes him the fourth Greek director awarded within the official competition programme of the prestigious festival. Theodoros Angelopoulos received the "Golden Palm" for his film "Eternity and a Day" in 1998 and the Grand Jury Prize for "Ulysses Gaze" in 1995. In 1962, the film "Electra" directed by Michalis Kakoyiannis won the award for best adaption of ancient Greek tragedy and in 1982 Costas Gavras won the "Golden Palm" for his film "Missing".
 
"The Lobster" is a co-production of Ireland, Great Britain, Greece, France and the Netherlands. It is the fourth film by Lanthimos after "Kinetta", "Dogtooth" that won the "Un Certain Regard" award at Cannes in 2009 and "Alps" that was awarded for best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival in 2011.

The film is presented as an unconventional love story that develops in the unspecified but near future. All lonely people under the laws of the City are arrested and transferred to the Hotel. There they have to find a suitable partner within 45 days. If they fail to do so, they are transferred into an animal of their choice that is released into the Woods. A desperate man manages to escape from the Hotel into the Woods where the lonely live and falls in love with a woman there, contrary to all rules.

The director himself describes his film as follows: "This is a story about love without being a conventional love story. It observes how and why some people become closer with each other and couples, while others not. This is a story about the frightening consequences of loneliness, of the fear of dying alone, the fear of living alone and especially the fear that you will live with someone else. The pressure that we exert on ourselves to love someone is a kind of harassment. Seeking and finding a person to love is another kind of harassment. "The Lobster" tries to find synonyms of love in words like fear, rules, terms, matching, synchronization, naivety, prosperity, lies."