Palme d'Or

• 1. Introduction

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  The Palme d'Or arrived in 1955, handed to director Delbert Mann for his film Marty. Mann was the first winner in the award's history. The prize takes its name from the French for "Golden Palm." The palm references the coat of arms of the city of Cannes. It also evokes the famous trees lining its Promenade de la Croisette. What Mann received that day bore little resemblance to the trophy given to winners now. The award was renamed, suspended for eleven years, and redesigned multiple times. What compels a jury to break its own rules to award it? And what might drive a winning director to publicly denounce the ceremony?

• 2. An Object in Gold and Crystal

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  The festival's board of directors invited several jewellers to submit palm designs. Parisian jeweller Lucienne Lazon won the commission. Her design drew on a sketch by the director Jean Cocteau. Lazon shaped the lower end of the stem into a bevelled form that curved into a heart. The pedestal was a terracotta sculpture by an artist named Sébastien.

  By 1984, the rounded pedestal supporting the palm had gradually been reshaped into a pyramid. In 1992, the designer Thierry de Bourqueney produced a new version worked in hand-cut crystal. Caroline Scheufele produced another redesign in 1997, and since then the Swiss jewellery firm Chopard has manufactured the trophy. The palm is formed from 4.16 ounces of 18-carat yellow gold. Where the branch meets its base, the metal curves into a small heart. A single piece of cut crystal forms a cushion beneath it, and the whole piece is hand-cast in a wax mould. The current version is presented in blue Morocco leather; earlier editions came in pure red Morocco leather lined with white suede.

  Theo Angelopoulos became the first director to hold the Palme d'Or in its current form. His film Eternity and a Day won in 1998. In 2017, the award was redesigned again to mark the festival's 70th anniversary. The diamonds that year came from a supplier certified by the Responsible Jewellery Council.

• 3. A Prize Between Names

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  Cannes planned its first film festival for 1939, but the outbreak of war cancelled it before it could open. When the festival held its inaugural edition in 1946, its highest award was the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film. That year, the festival gave the prize to eleven films simultaneously, an outcome that left the competition without a single clear winner. In 1954, the organizers decided the Grand Prix would come with a new design each year, contributed by a contemporary artist. That process led to commissioning a palm design, and the resulting award was named the Palme d'Or. In 1964, the festival reverted to calling its top prize the Grand Prix. That substitution held through 1974. The Palme d'Or returned in 1975 and has not been set aside since.

• 4. Three Trophies, One Film

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  Steven Spielberg led the Cannes jury in 2013 when the Palme d'Or produced an unprecedented result. The jury chose to award the prize to Blue Is the Warmest Color, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. Cannes policy prevents a Palme d'Or-winning film from receiving any other award at the same ceremony. That restriction would have barred the jury from separately recognizing the film's two lead actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. The jury resolved the conflict by presenting trophies to all three of them. Three separate Palme d'Or trophies were handed out, the only time in the award's history that this has happened.

  Spiélberg accounted for the decision with a note about the casting: had it been three percent wrong, he said, the film would not have worked for the jury. Kechiche took a different view. He later told The Hollywood Reporter that the ceremony had "publicly insulted" him. He auctioned off his trophy to fund his next feature film. Discussing the sale, he said that liberating himself from the Palme d'Or was "a way of washing my hands of this sorry affair."

• 5. The World Outside the Theatre

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  In 1968, Cannes called off its festival midway through its run. The decision came in solidarity with students and workers then demonstrating across France in what became known as the May 68 movement. No awards were presented that year.

  The 2014 Palme d'Or ceremony unfolded in the shadow of a disaster that had struck the day before the festival opened. The Soma mine disaster had killed workers in Turkey. When director Nuri Bilge Ceylan accepted the prize for Winter Sleep, he dedicated it to the "young people" caught in Turkey's ongoing political unrest and to the workers who had died at Soma. His acceptance speech also came during the 100th anniversary year of Turkish cinema.

  In 2020, the festival was cancelled entirely because of COVID-19. The organizers announced 56 official selections but presented no prizes. It was the first time since 1968 that the ceremony passed without awards.

• 6. Women and the Palm

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  As of 2026, three women have won the Palme d'Or as director. Jane Campion received it for The Piano, Julia Ducournau for Titane, and Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall. No other women had claimed the prize before Campion or in the years between their victories.

  At the inaugural 1946 festival, Bodil Ipsen co-directed one of the top-prize-sharing films, The Red Meadows. She and her co-director Lau Lauritzen Jr. received the Grand Prix alongside the other winners from that year's tie. That prize was the Grand Prix, not the Palme d'Or. Still, it stands as the earliest instance of a female director reaching the top of the Cannes competition.

  From 2026, non-English films that win the Palme d'Or automatically qualify for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Fjord, directed by Cristian Mungiu, became the first Palme d'Or winner eligible under that new rule.