Jeremy Strong has compared serving on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival to "'Conclave' with Champagne".

The 'Succession' star was among the famous faces entrusted with picking the winners at the glitzy festival this year and he's revealed jury duty was comparable to the election of a new Pope in critically-acclaimed movie 'Conclave'.

According to Variety, Jeremy said during a press conference: "I feel immeasurably inspired by what I've seen here. It's been so invigorating, and this sort of cumulative tally of the work I'll carry with me ...

"This has been a really wonderful experience, a really connected experience with these people - it's like 'Conclave' with Champagne. It's really great."

The festival jury was led by president Juliette Binoche and also featured Halle Berry, Payal Kapadia, Hong Sansoo, Alba Rohrwacher, Leila Slimani, Dieudo Hamadi and Carlos Reygadas.

The festival's top prize - the Palme d'Or - was awarded to director Jafar Panahi's new drama 'It Was Just an Accident', which tells the story of a group of former prisoners in Iran who plot their revenge on a man they believe was a guard who tortured them behind bars.

Binoche said of the film: "It's very human and political at the same time because he comes from a complicated country, politically speaking.

"When we watched the film, it really stood out. The film springs from a feeling of resistance, survival, which is absolutely necessary today. So we thought it was important to give this film the paramount award.

"Art will always win. What is human will always win. Our creative urge can transform the world."

Strong added: "[We] wanted to recognize films that we felt were transcendent intrinsically as pieces of work ... Ibsen talked about: 'Deep inside, there's a poem in a poem. And when you hear that, when you grasp that, you will understand my song'.

"And I feel that this film and the other films have these poems within the poem that allow us to grasp something ineffable that have changed me."

Panahi previously admitted the film drew on his own personal experience of prison, telling the Guardian newspaper: "The first time I was in prison I was in solitary confinement.

"I was on my own in a tiny cell and they would take me out blindfolded to a place where I would sit in front of a wall and hear this voice at my back. It was the voice of the man who would question me - sometimes for two hours, sometimes for eight hours.

"And I would just hang on his voice all that time, fantasising about who this person was from his voice. And I had an intuition that someday this voice would be an aspect of something I'd write or shoot and give a creative life to."

Speaking after winning the top prize at Cannes, the moviemaker said: "Let's put all the problems, all the differences aside; the most important thing right now is our country and our country's freedom.

"Let's reach that moment together when no one dares to tell us what we should completely include, what we should say, what we shouldn't do… Cinema is a society. No one has the right to tell us what you should do, what you shouldn't do."

The festival's second prize - the the Grand Prix - went to 'Sentimental Value' starring Stellan Skarsgard and the Jury Prize was a tie between ' Sound of Falling' and 'Sirat' while the Camera d'Or award went to 'The President's Cake'.