Υes We Cannes: Palmes d’Or We Loved

The much-discussed Palme d’Or by Theo Angelopoulos follows the legendary Bruno Ganz on a final walk through memory, the present, and great, unspoken farewells. Cinema here becomes the ultimate journey through time. — An elderly writer spends one last day in Thessaloniki as he prepares to be admitted to hospital. During his wanderings, he encounters a migrant child and begins to travel between moments of the present and memories of his past. This journey brings to the surface unfulfilled relationships, lost words, and unresolved goodbyes. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1998 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 1998 Best Film | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998 Best Supporting Actress (Eleni Gerasimidou) | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998 Best Director | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998 Best Screenplay | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998 Best Set Decoration | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998 Best Music | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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