“Cake on Cake Never Wins”: Pelle Sjoenell on Film’s Unique Power at Cannes Lions

Film was Cannes Lions' first and only category for 38 years. Pelle Sjoenell believes it will prove to be its most enduring.

“My prediction is that it will be the last, because film does something to us that other mediums can't do. It moves us like nothing else,” says the 2026 Film Lions jury president.

He points to science to back up his prediction. “Film synchronises human brains,” he says. “If you put a thousand people in a room and show them the same film, we'd laugh at the same time and feel the same things. Our neuron activity aligns.

“That's why it's made for mass communication. It's made for advertising. It's why it started in propaganda and all these things. It's a very powerful medium.”

Meanwhile, new technologies and platforms – and the award categories they inspire – are less a threat than further evidence of film's resilience. “There will be new, awesome categories and mediums we haven't even thought of yet,” says Pelle, who was formerly worldwide chief creative officer at Droga5, before departing in February. “But think about it: every new media form since film came around – the internet, social, whatever it is – film has led it. It's still leading. It's just different eras."

The questions now for Pelle and his jury are: “What is film this year? How are we seeing it evolve?” In his bid to answer those and honour modern advertising’s most impressive work in Film, he is looking for work where idea and execution are inseparable.

“It's not one or the other. It's both, fused,” he says. “If you can separate them, it is not a Film Lion. Film Craft is next door. Craft alone will not win in our room.

“The best ads are nothing like ads,” he adds. “The best work doesn't look like ads, doesn't feel like ads, doesn't even smell like ads.”

Which matters even more in a world where audiences have become professionals at avoiding advertising altogether. "People pay to enjoy artistic cinema, but they pay to avoid the films we're judging,” says Pelle. “An entire industry – streaming subscriptions, premium tiers, ad blockers – was built specifically to skip what we're about to celebrate."

And yet, the best commercial filmmaking makes people stop their scrolling, watch again, and – perhaps most importantly – willingly share with someone. “When you're working uphill, a powerful idea wrapped in craft isn't optional. It's the only thing that elevates you,” says Pelle.

Having reviewed hundreds of submissions during pre-judging, Pelle is already spotting patterns in the work. Appropriately for a Cannes Lions jury president, he explains them through a metaphor inspired by the Mediterranean.

“Trends move like tides,” he says. “They rise toward the shore, break, and return as their own opposites.”

As an example, he heads back to the ‘90s when “irony” broke on the shores of the Croisette before returning out into the Mediterranean a few years later as “sincerity”. “‘Participation’ is recently turning into ‘authorship’ and I hope ‘spectacle’ will soon turn into ‘precision’. AI approached us as a wave of ‘imitation’, and perhaps is fading in the form of ‘anxiety’, and then coming back as ‘emotion’.

“The best work doesn't follow the wave,” he adds. “It knows when it's time to turn.”

Another shift is the continued return of comedy, which Pelle has welcomed in recent post-pandemic years. “I think it needed a beat,” he says. “There was that sense of, 'too early'. I think we've passed that now. We're starting to see comedy return, and that's great. Comedy and satire are needed to help us get by, and they're as effective as they've ever been in advertising and for brands."

And while neuroscience helped Pelle explain film’s enduring power for brands, he finds the principles of great commercial filmmaking in the words of some of cinema's most celebrated storytellers. He reads a snippet to me of a letter he wrote to his jury.

“Jean Luc Godard called cinema the most beautiful fraud in the world – built on illusion, constructed, artificial – and yet it produces something genuinely felt. Don't reward the work that hid the construction. Reward the work that used it brilliantly.

“Alfred Hitchcock said film is not a slice of life but a piece of cake. Deliciously layered.”

Which serves as the perfect bridge to one of Pelle’s own creative philosophies, inspired by his native Sweden – and perhaps his most important piece of advice for his jurors.

“We call it ‘cake on cake’,” he says. “It means a cake doesn’t get better with another cake on top of it, it's just a mess.

“The best ideas are singular. One clear, powerful thought executed with total conviction. When something feels overloaded, trying to be too many things at once – that's cake on cake. And cake on cake never wins.”

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​Read more Cannes Lions coverage here.

​Read more from Addison Capper here.
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