20 Palmes d'Or

How does art talk about art? Ruben Östlund plays around with surrealism, satire and physical comedy, following the moral and professional dilemmas of a museum director setting up a controversial new exhibit and triggering massive reactions. Palme d’Or in Cannes. — The intelligent and handsome curator of a contemporary art museum is a divorced father, drives an electric car and supports charitable organizations. The new exhibition he has curated is an installment that invites people to consider altruism and promotes responsibility towards our fellow human beings. Sometimes, though, it's hard to live up to your own ideals. Both him and the museum are facing existential crises. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2018 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2017 Best European Film | Goya Awards | 2018

Nobody speaks in Jacques Demy’s Palme d’Or winner. Every word is sung to Michel Legrand’s music, right down to the small talk in a car repair garage, and with a twenty-year-old Catherine Deneuve at its heart, it’s the kind of film that shows you why people love cinema. — Geneviève, who lives above her mother’s umbrella shop in Cherbourg, is in love with Guy, a twenty-year-old mechanic, and the two are secretly planning to marry over her mother’s objections. Then Guy is called up and sent to Algeria, and Geneviève discovers she’s pregnant. Her mother’s advice is to say yes to a wealthy merchant who has asked for her hand. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 1965 Nominated for Best Original Song | Oscars | 1966 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1964 OCIC Award | Cannes Film Festival | 1964

It won at one of the very first Cannes festivals, earned Carol Reed an Oscar nomination, and every film noir since has been measured against it. Mystery hangs over the ruins of post-war Vienna, and Orson Welles, on screen for little more than ten minutes, is the one you remember. — Four occupying armies have carved up the ruins of post-war Vienna when Holly Martins, a writer of cheap cowboy novels, arrives at the invitation of his old friend Harry Lime. There he learns that Harry died a few days earlier. At the funeral everyone tells him the same story, except that the details don’t match. — Best Cinematography | Oscars | 1951 Best British Film | BAFTA | 1950 Grand Jury Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1949

Michael Haneke went looking for the roots of fascism and won the Palme d’Or, a Golden Globe and many other awards. In a Protestant village in early 20th-century Germany, accident after accident looks less like chance, nobody will say who is behind them, and the children know more than they let on. — A year before the First World War, the doctor of a Protestant village in northern Germany is thrown when his horse trips on a wire strung across the road. More accidents follow, with no explanations, and though suspicion falls on the villagers, nobody is willing to talk. All the while the village children are watching, and they may know more than the adults are prepared to admit. — Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2010 Nomination for Best Cinematography | Oscars | 2010 Golden Palm | Cannes Film Festival | 2009 Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 2010 FIPRESCI Prize | San Sebastian Film Festival | 2009

The cinematic triumph of Cinobo-favourite Bong Joon-ho. A stylistic apotheosis filled with suspense and a piercing social commentary that defies genre. Rightful winner of the Palm d’ Or and the Best Picture Oscar that made Academy history. — The Kims are a loving family, but they are all unemployed and their future seems gloom. The son of the family finds a job as a private tutor and can finally hope for a steady income. Carrying the whole family’s expectations, he goes to interview at the Park household – owners of an international tech company – where he will meet the lady of the house. After that first meeting, a cascade of unfortunate events begins. — Best Film | Oscars | 2020 Best Director | Oscars | 2020 Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 2020 Best International Feature Film | Oscars | 2020 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2019

Coppola made it between the two parts of “The Godfather” and won the Palme d’Or. Gene Hackman is the man in headphones who trusts nobody, not even himself, whose wiretaps feed his paranoia and whose conscience wakes at the worst moments. Afterwards, the saxophone stays in your ears. — In a San Francisco gripped by conspiracy theories, Harry Caul makes his living listening in on other people’s conversations, and there isn’t much else to his life. When the head of a big corporation hires him to record a young couple walking through a crowded square, he finds himself playing the tape back over and over, because there’s more on it than first appears. — Palme D'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1974 Nomination for Best Picture | Oscars | 1975 Nomination for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1975 Nomination for Best Sound | Oscars | 1975 Best Editing | BAFTA Awards | 1975 Best Soundtrack | BAFTA Awards | 1975

More political and humanist than ever, the tireless Ken Loach is looking for human worth behind the coldness of bureaucracy, statistics and numbers and rightfully wins the second Palme d’Or of his career in Cannes. — Daniel Blake is a 60-year-old carpenter from Newcastle. After a heart attack, he's going to need for the first time the help of the state to survive, but the convoluted bureaucracy is leading him nowhere. He crosses paths with a single mother with similar problems and, finding unexpected friendship and warmth in each other, they join forces and try to fight back. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2016 Audience Award | Locarno Film Festival | 2016 Audience Award | San Sebastián Film Festival | 2016

Its Palme d’Or came in 1975, and half a century later it’s still the only African film ever to win it. Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation helped restore all three hours of this epic of Algerian history, in which Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, having lost his actor, played the village madman himself. — Drought drives Ahmed from his village in 1939 Algeria to a town where colonial power is much closer at hand. Then come the French army, a quarry and fifteen years of small humiliations, until the peasant has become a man who has chosen a side. His son is watching. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1975

Malick’s Palme d’Or winner is about faith, family and where we came from, and for the birth of the universe he asked the man behind the famous tunnel in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, who made it from paint, milk and water. It still divides people: you give in to it or you don’t. Plus Brad Pitt. — Jack grows up as the eldest son in 1950s America, in a house where his father corrects everything and his mother forgives it all. Time and again the film leaves that house for the story of the universe being born, the first cells and the dinosaurs, and Jack, now an adult, is still arguing with his father in his head. — Palme D'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2011 Nomination for Best Picture | Oscars | 2012 Nomination for Best Director | Oscars | 2012 Nomination for Best Cinematography | Oscars | 2012 FIPRESCI Prize | San Sebastián Film Festival | 2011

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux left Cannes in 2013 with a share of the Palme d’Or alongside their director, because for this film the jury changed its own rules. Their love story is one of the most intense of recent years, and it has become a cult film far beyond the LGBTQ+ community. — At fifteen, Adèle longs for romance and is only beginning to discover her sexuality, and a fling with a boy from her class fizzles out before it has really started. Then she meets a girl with blue hair, and her life is turned upside down. Their affair is intense, full of love and erotic passion, and the girl awakens Adèle to desire and pleasure and helps her see who she could become as a woman. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2013 FIPRESCI Prize | San Sebastián International Film Festival | 2013

Haneke won the Palme d’Or and an Oscar for his most tender film. Jean-Louis Trintignant (“Three Colours: Red”) and Emmanuelle Riva (“Hiroshima mon amour”) play a couple whose love has weathered everything, until it comes up against the one thing nothing and nobody can defeat. — Georges and Anne are retired music teachers in their eighties who have been together for decades and have lived in the same Paris flat for many years. Then one morning at breakfast, Anne stops in mid-sentence and stares blankly into space. From then on her memory begins to fade, taking with it the life the two of them have built together. — Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2013 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2012 Best Actress (Emmanuelle Riva) | BAFTA Awards | 2013 Best European Director | European Film Awards | 2013 Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 2013 FIPRESCI Prize | San Sebastian Film Festival | 2012

Nothing would be the same in European cinema after the first screening of what turned out to be one of the most influential films in history. The week of Marcello, Paparazzo, the stars, the ephemeral glow and fake idols, a journey to life’s true meaning. — Wandering through a privileged enclave of Rome, Marcello, a gossip journalist, encounters elegant aristocrats, hungry artists, vulgar nouveau riche, charlatans and "magicians" of the elite nightlife. He discovers that beneath the surface of their deceptive grace lurks emptiness, despair and loneliness, all of which lead to an implacable thinker friend finding a tragic end. — Palme D'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1960 Best Costume Design | Oscars | 1962

The Cannes jury voted unanimously to give it the Palme d’Or, the first for a French film in twenty-one years. The teacher is played by the man who wrote the book it’s based on, and real pupils from the school sit at the desks. No film is truer about how little of school actually happens in lessons. — François teaches French at a secondary school in Paris, and in the first week of the new year he faces a class of teenagers whose families come from more than a dozen countries. Keeping them in order takes more out of him than teaching them ever does, until one argument goes too far and a single word he shouldn’t have used changes the rest of the year. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2008 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2009 Best Adapted Screenplay | César Awards | 2009 Best Foreign Film | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 2009 Best Film Award | Lumiere Awards | 2009

After "The Square", Reuben Östlund again tackles class satire in a delightful black comedy that puts Marx, consumerism and... bodily fluids in a blender against the backdrop of the greek Chiliadou beach. — Carl and Yaya are influencer fashion models whose relationship is increasingly soured by money. Offered free places on a luxury cruise, they find themselves sharing a superyacht with arms dealers and an oligarch, while a cynical Marxist alcoholic captains the ship as things quickly turn upside-down. — Nomination for Best Film | Oscars | 2023 Nomination for Best Director | Oscars | 2023 Nomination for Best Screenplay | Oscars | 2023 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2022 Best European Film | European Film Awards | 2023

The Palm d’Or that sent shockwaves through Cannes. After the triumph of Raw, Ducournau returns to become only the second woman in the festibal's history to have won its highest honor. She did it with a story that’s hard to stomach, where nothing is as it seems and nothing is out of limits. — After a series of unexplained crimes, a father rediscovers his son, who has been missing for 10 years. Titane: A metal highly resistant to heat and corrosion, with high tensile strength alloys. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2021

Rosetta will take any job she can get, and the Dardenne brothers keep the camera so close to her that her panic becomes yours. It won them the first of their two Palmes d’Or, and Belgium went on to name a youth employment law after her. — Rosetta lives in a caravan on the edge of a Belgian town with her alcoholic mother, and all she wants is work, any work, on any terms. The film is only minutes old when she loses the job she has. When Riquet from the waffle stand offers her his friendship, what she’d really like is his job. — Golden Palm | Cannes Film Festival | 1999 Best Actress Awards (Emilie Dequenne) | Cannes Film Festival | 1999

The Cannes Palme d’Or was awarded to "Dheepan" for the film’s authentic, heartrending and deeply humane look at the experiences of 21st-century refugees, as faced by its electrifying protagonist. A cinematic punch to the gut. — A Tamil Tiger warrior becomes a deserter in order to leave Sri Lanka, where a civil war is raging. He comes across a young woman and a girl who also need to escape from their homeland; although unrelated, they form a makeshift family and reach Paris by using a dead man's passport. French immigration officers take them to a suburban apartment complex that looks like a prison. There, instead of making a fresh start, the three have to contend with the violence of local thugs and drug dealers. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2015

Save this Palme d’Or winner for a day when you can’t see the point of going on. Kiarostami puts a man who has decided to die behind the wheel, and out of his long drive he builds one of the most moving films about what keeps us alive. Afterwards, even cherries taste different. — Mr Badii has decided to kill himself, and all he needs is someone to come at dawn and bury him. So he drives the hills outside Tehran, offering the job to strangers he picks up. A young soldier bolts and a seminarian refuses, but a man who works at the Natural History Museum says yes, for reasons of his own, and then he starts to talk. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1997

A prominent moment in Mike Leigh's filmography, who records daily life with unique sensitivity, as defined by the invisible camera and his original characters that are searching for the truth of life through secrets and lies. Awarded in Cannes,1996, with Palme d'Or and two more awards. — After the death of her wealthy adoptive parents, a young black ophthalmologist searches for and finds her natural mother, a poor white worker from east London, setting off a series of confessions. — Best Actress (Brenda Blethyn) | Cannes Film Festival | 1996 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1996 Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture (Brenda Blethyn) | Golden Globes | 1997 Nominated for Best Picture | Oscars | 1997 Nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Brenda Blethyn) | Oscars | 1997 Nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) | Oscars | 1997 Nominated for Best Director | Oscars | 1997 Nominated for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1997 Nominated for Best Motion Picture - Drama | Golden Globes | 1997 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) | Golden Globes | 1997

It took the Palme d’Or at Cannes, even as its director was accused back home in Japan of bringing shame on his country. A family who shoplift to survive take in a child who isn’t theirs, and ending up with them is the best thing that has ever happened to her. — Fresh from another petty theft, a man and his son find a little girl out in the freezing cold, clearly chilled to the bone. His wife isn’t keen at first, but she ends up agreeing to take the girl in and look after her. Money is short and they scrape by from day to day, yet theirs is a happy home, until the day something goes wrong. — Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2019 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2018