It’s not always noted, but there are two Cannes film festivals, one composed of critics, journalists and industry professionals and the other inhabited by the sequestered jury. Sometimes these two Cannes speak with one voice, but in this 69th festival, they definitely did not.

The German film Toni Erdmann, directed by Maren Ade, one of the few women in the competition, was easily the non-jury favorite among the 21 films eligible for prizes.

Both wildly raucous and movingly humane, it chronicles the evolving relationship between a prankster father and his high-powered careerist daughter. Far from winning a top prize, however, Toni Erdmann was totally shut out by the jury chaired by Mad Max director George Miller. The same thing also happened to several other audience-approved films, such as Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. Other big Cannes premieres, like Jodie Foster’s Money Monster, debuted outside the competition altogether.

Instead, on May 22, the Palme d’Or went to 79-year-old British filmmaker Ken Loach for I, Daniel Blake, the on-the-nose narrative of working-class folks getting the runaround from an unfeeling government welfare bureaucracy.

Loach, who first won the Palme a decade ago for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, gave an impassioned acceptance speech, championing “a cinema of dissent against those who are powerful and mighty. We must show that another world is possible and necessary”.

The other awards, each baffling in its own way, included the Grand Prix to Canada’s Xavier Dolan for his It’s Only the End of the World, the Jury Prize to Britain’s Andrea Arnold for American Honey, and the actress award to Jaclyn Jose, the star of Phillipine director Brillante Mendoza’s Ma’ Rosa.

As the choices above indicate, every visitor to Cannes constructs his or her own festival out of what interests them and what they can manage to see. One characteristic of this year’s Cannes is that many of its finest films were unaccountably left out of the main competition.