Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Cannes Film Festival was founded in 1946, though its origins trace to 1938 when France sought to create an alternative to the Venice Film Festival. Venice had shown a fascist bias, and in 1938 Mussolini and Hitler overruled its jury, prompting French, British, and American jurors to walk out and inspiring the creation of Cannes.
The Cannes Film Festival is held in Cannes, France, at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès. The city was selected as the festival's location on the 31st of May 1939, chosen over Biarritz for its appeal as a French Riviera resort town.
The most prestigious award at the Cannes Film Festival is the Palme d'Or, or Golden Palm, given for the best film. It was created in 1955, replacing the earlier Grand Prix du Festival.
The 1968 Cannes Film Festival was halted on the 19th of May after filmmaker Louis Malle and a group of directors seized the Palais and stopped the screenings. They acted in solidarity with students and workers on strike across France and protested the eviction of the head of the Cinémathèque Française.
Netflix withdrew from the Cannes Film Festival because of France's enforcement, beginning in 2018, of an eighteen-month theatrical screening window for main competition titles. The dispute followed the 2017 selection of two Netflix films, The Meyerowitz Stories and Okja, and the streaming company has stayed away ever since.
Iris Knobloch was elected the first woman president of the Cannes Film Festival in 2022. She succeeded Pierre Lescure, a festival co-founder and former head of Canal+, who had served since 2014.