The Cannes Film Festival’s top jury prize has long been one of the most coveted awards in international cinema. Over decades of competition, the Palme has crowned instant classics like ROME OPEN CITY and TASTE OF CHERRY, recognized the mastery of auteurs like Ermanno Olmi and Mike Leigh, and thrust masterpieces from the Soviet Union (THE CRANES ARE FLYING), Thailand (UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES), and Romania (4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS) into the international spotlight. Take a stroll down the red carpet and revisit some of the festival’s most memorable past winners.
Directed by David Lean • 1945 • United Kingdom
Starring Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard
After a chance meeting on a train platform, a married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) begin a muted but passionate, and ultimately doomed, love affair. With its evocatively fog-en...
Directed by Roberto Rossellini • 1945 • Italy
Starring Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero
This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with more melodramatic flair than the films t...
Directed by Alf Sjöberg • 1951 • Sweden
Starring Anita Björk, Ulf Palme
Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjöberg’s visually innovative, Cannes Grand Prix-winning adaptation of August Strindberg’s renowned 1888 play brings to scalding life the excoriating words of the stage’s preeminent surveyor of all thin...
Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa • 1953 • Japan
Starring Kazuo Hasegawa, Machiko Kyo
A winner of Academy Awards for best foreign-language film and best costume design, GATE OF HELL is a visually sumptuous, psychologically penetrating work from Teinosuke Kinugasa. In the midst of epic, violent intr...
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1953 • France
Starring Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eyck
In a squalid South American oil town, four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route. As they ferry their explosive...
Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov • 1957 • Soviet Union
Starring Tatiana Samoilova, Alexei Batalov, Vasily Merkuryev
This landmark film by the virtuosic Mikhail Kalatozov was heralded as a revelation in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and the international cinema community alike. It tells the story of ...
Directed by Marcel Camus • 1959 • Brazil, France
Starring Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, Lourdes de Oliveira
Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ BLACK ORPHEUS (ORFEU NEGRO) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus ...
Directed by Luis Buñuel • 1961 • Spain
Starring Silvia Pinal, Fernando Rey, Francisco Rabal
Banned in Spain and denounced by the Vatican, Luis Buñuel’s irreverent vision of life as a beggar’s banquet is regarded by many as his masterpiece. In it, novice nun Viridiana does her utmost to maintain ...
Directed by Jacques Demy • 1964 • France
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo
The angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a h...
Directed by Ermanno Olmi • 1978 • Italy
Starring Luigi Ornaghi, Francesca Moriggi, Omar Brignoli
A painterly and sensual immersion in late nineteenth-century Italian farm life, Ermanno Olmi’s THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS lovingly focuses on four families working for one landowner on an isolated e...
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff • 1979 • Germany
Starring David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler
Oskar is born in Germany in 1924 with an advanced intellect. Repulsed by the hypocrisy of adults and the irresponsibility of society, he refuses to grow older after his third birthday. While the c...
Directed by Wim Wenders • 1984 • France, West Germany
Starring Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell, Nastassja Kinski
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (WINGS OF DESIRE) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in PARIS, TEXAS, a profoundly moving character study written by ...
Directed by Mike Leigh • 1996 • United Kingdom
Mike Leigh's Palme D'Or winning family drama concerns a working class woman who is shocked when the mixed-race daughter she gave up at birth tracks her down.
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1997 • Iran
Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry is an emotionally complex meditation on life and death. Middle-aged Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives through the hilly outskirts of Tehran, s...
Directed by Cristian Mungiu • 2007 • Romania
Starring Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov
Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu shot to international prominence with this rigorously realistic Palme d’Or–winning second feature. In 1987, during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, colle...
Directed by Jacques Audiard • 2015 • France
Starring Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby
With this Palme d’Or–winning drama, which deftly combines seemingly disparate genres, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard cemented his status as a titan of contemporary world ...
