Cannes Film Festival

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cannes Film Festival was born out of fury. In 1938, at the Venice Film Festival, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler overruled the jury and handed the top prizes to an Italian war film and a German documentary glorifying the Nazi regime. The French, British, and American jurors walked out, vowing never to return. From that outrage, an idea took shape on the French Riviera. How does a festival conceived as a stand against fascism become, decades later, the most prestigious film event in the world? What happens when politics, commerce, glamour, and art all crowd onto the same red carpet? And why was its very first edition silenced before a single prize could be awarded?

• 2. A Festival Almost Stillborn

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  On the 31st of May 1939, the city of Cannes was chosen as the festival's home, beating out Biarritz. The town hall and the French government signed an official birth certificate naming the event Le Festival International du Film. Jean Zay, the French Minister of National Education, had set the project in motion, acting on suggestions from the official and historian Philippe Erlanger and the film journalist Robert Favre Le Bret. Cannes won partly because its city hall promised to raise its financial stake and build a dedicated venue.

  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer chartered an ocean liner to ferry Hollywood royalty across the Atlantic. Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, James Cagney, and Spencer Tracy were among the stars who arrived. On the 31st of August, the opening night gala began with a private screening of the American film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The timing could not have been worse. On the 1st of September, German troops invaded Poland, and the festival was postponed for ten days. On the 3rd of September, France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. The French government ordered a general mobilisation, and the festival was cancelled before it had truly begun.

• 3. Relaunch And Reinvention

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  From the 20th of September to the 5th of October 1946, twenty-one countries presented films at the First Cannes International Film Festival, held in the former Casino of Cannes. The early years were rocky. In 1947 the event ran under the name Festival du film de Cannes amid serious efficiency problems, and films from sixteen countries appeared. Budgetary troubles cancelled the festival entirely in 1948 and again in 1950.

  In 1949, the Palais des Festivals was built specifically for the event on the seafront promenade of La Croisette. Its unfinished roof blew off during a storm before it could prove itself. A more lasting decision came in 1951, when organisers moved the festival to spring to avoid colliding with Venice, which ran in autumn. That same year, the FIAPF formally accredited the festival. The shift to May would become one of the festival's defining traits.

• 4. Prizes, Politics, And A Strike

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  In 1955, the Palme d'Or was created, replacing the Grand Prix du Festival as the festival's highest honour. Other milestones piled up across the decade. The Special Jury Prize was first awarded in 1954. In 1957, Dolores del Río became the first woman to serve on the jury for the official selection. The festival also began answering criticism over its choices, creating the Critics' Prize to honour original films and daring filmmakers.

  Jean Cocteau, who served three times as president of the jury, captured the festival's stated ideal. "The Cannes Festival should be a no man's land in which politics has no place," he said. "It should be a simple meeting between friends." The reality was messier. Films like Night and Fog in 1956 and Hiroshima, My Love in 1959 were kept out of competition for diplomatic reasons.

  Politics finally erupted on the 19th of May 1968, when the festival was halted. The day before, the filmmaker Louis Malle and a group of directors had seized the large room of the Palais and stopped the screenings. They acted in solidarity with students and workers on strike across France, and in protest of the eviction of the head of the Cinémathèque Française. Carlos Saura and Miloš Forman had already withdrawn their films. The protesters won the president's reinstatement and founded the Film Directors' Society that year. In 1969, that society created the Directors' Fortnight, a non-competitive section prized for its independent judgment.

• 5. The Marketplace

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  In 1959, the Marché du Film was founded, giving the festival a commercial character it had not had before. It connected sellers and buyers across the film industry and became the first international platform for film commerce. Today it is described as the busiest film market in the world. Through a collaboration with Think-Film Impact Production, the Marché has launched the impACT programme, which spotlights societal themes through panels and workshops. One strand, The Future of Film is Green, featured figures including Aliza Ayaz, Claire Havet, and Lucy Stone, who shared strategies for more sustainable, climate-conscious production.

  The festival has become a vital showcase for European cinema. Jill Forbes and Sarah Street argue in European Cinema: An Introduction that Cannes became extremely important for critical and commercial interests and for European efforts to sell films on the strength of their artistic quality. They note that Cannes, alongside Venice and Berlin, helps shape a country's image of its own cinema and reinforces the idea of European film as art cinema. Producers come to launch new films and sell them to distributors who travel from across the globe.

• 6. The Architects

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  In 1978, Gilles Jacob became General Delegate and reshaped the festival's structure. He introduced the Caméra d'Or for the best first film of any main event, and the Un Certain Regard section for non-competitive categories. He cut the festival's length down to thirteen days, reducing the number of selected films. He also opened the jury to celebrities and film-industry professionals, where before it had been composed of film academics.

  Maurice Bessy, named General Delegate in 1972, had already begun freeing the selection from diplomatic pressures, with films like MASH marking the turn. He helped directors like Andrei Tarkovsky escape censorship in their own countries. Before Bessy, individual countries chose the films that represented them; in 1972 he created separate committees to select French and foreign films.

  Jacob's reach extended for decades. In 1998 he created la Cinéfondation, the last section of the Official Selection, to support new cinema and bring fresh screenwriters into the profession. It grew with La Résidence in 2000 and L'Atelier in 2005, which helps twenty directors a year fund their films. Jacob was appointed Honorary President in 2000, and in 2002 the festival officially took the name Festival de Cannes. In 2007, Thierry Frémaux became General Delegate and pushed the festival outward, launching a Cannes film week in Buenos Aires in 2009 and the Cannes Court Métrage short-film competition in 2010.

• 7. Scandals And Standoffs

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  In 2015, female attendees at a red carpet premiere were turned away for wearing flat shoes instead of high heels, in an incident dubbed Heelgate. Celebrities responded by wearing flats or no shoes at all to other premieres in protest. That same year, General Delegate Thierry Frémaux reportedly banned selfies on the red carpet.

  The Harvey Weinstein scandal and the MeToo movement reached the festival directly. In 2018, officials announced a telephone hotline run in collaboration with the French government, allowing victims to report sexual harassment and other crimes during the event. A different fight broke out over how films reach audiences. In 2017, during the festival's 70th anniversary, Cannes selected two Netflix-produced films, The Meyerowitz Stories and Okja, for the main competition. France's enforcement of an eighteen-month theatrical window, applied from 2018 only to main competition titles, led the streaming company to withdraw from the festival entirely, a stance it has kept ever since.

  Global conflict shaped recent editions too. In 2022, the festival denied press accreditation to Russian journalists tied to outlets that did not oppose the Russo-Ukrainian war. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky appeared by video on opening night to speak about the war and the role of cinema. The 2025 edition featured a record 45 percent of films directed by women. It was also marked by tragedy: Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, a central subject of the documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk by Sepideh Farsi, was killed with ten members of her family in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on the 16th of April 2025. On opening day, more than 350 directors, actors, and producers signed a letter condemning her killing.

• 8. Who Holds The Reins

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  The president of the festival represents it before financial partners, public authorities, and the media. That role is elected by the board of directors, officially named the French Association of the Film Festival. The president holds a renewable three-year mandate and appoints the team, including the general delegate, with the board's approval. After a final term, a president can become honorary president.

  When Gilles Jacob moved from general delegate to president in 2001, his old post was split into two roles: a general director to oversee the event's smooth running, and an artistic director to select the films. The arrangement did not last neatly, since in 2007 the artistic director Thierry Frémaux became general delegate once more.

  In 2022, Iris Knobloch was elected the first woman president of the festival. She succeeded Pierre Lescure, a festival co-founder and former head of the French pay-TV operator Canal+, who had served since 2014. The juries themselves gather each year at the historic Villa Domergue to choose the winners, the final word in a contest that began as a refusal to let dictators decide who wins.