Palme d'Or

History

In 1954, the Jury of the Festival de Cannes suggested giving an award titled the "Grand Prix of the International Film Festival" with a new design each year from a contemporary artist. At the end of 1954, the Festival's Board of Directors invited several jewellers to submit designs for a palm, in tribute to the coat of arms of the City of Cannes. The original design by the jeweller Lucienne Lazon had the bevelled lower extremity of the stalk forming a heart, and the pedestal a sculpture in terracotta by the artist Sébastien.

In 1955, the first Palme d'Or was awarded to Delbert Mann for Marty, and it remained the highest award until 1964, when copyright issues with the Palme led the Festival to return to the Grand Prix. In 1975 the Palme d'Or was reintroduced and has since remained the symbol of the Cannes Film Festival, awarded every year to the director of the Best Feature Film of the Official Competition, and presented in a case of pure red Morocco leather lined with white suede.

As of 2015, Jane Campion is the only female director to have won the Palme d'Or, for The Piano. However, in 2013 the actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, were also awarded the Palme d'Or, as they received the award as the lead actors of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, alongside director Abdellatif Kechiche—the decision by the Steven Spielberg-headed jury was considered unorthodox. These choices were due to a Cannes policy that forbids the Palme d'Or-winning film from receiving any additional awards, thereby preventing the Jury from rewarding the film's two main actresses. According to Spielberg: "Had the casting been 3% wrong, it wouldn't have worked like it did for us".

Since its reintroduction, the prize has been redesigned several times. At the beginning of the 1980s, the rounded shape of the pedestal, bearing the palm, gradually transformed to become pyramidal in 1984. In 1992 Thierry de Bourqueney redesigned the Palme and its pedestal in hand-cut crystal. The current design, first presented in 1997, is by Caroline Scheufele from Chopard. A single piece of cut crystal forms a cushion for the 24-carat gold palm, which was hand-cast into a wax mould and presented in a case of blue Morocco leather.

The winner of the 2014 Palme d'Or, Winter Sleep—a Turkish film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan—occurred during the same year as the 100th anniversary of Turkish cinema. Upon receiving the award, Ceylan dedicated the prize to both the "young people" involved in the ongoing political unrest of Turkey and the workers who were killed in the Soma mine disaster, which occurred on the day prior to the commencement of the awards event.

Grand Prix du Festival International du Film (1939–54)

Palme d'Or (1975–present)

* _{denotes first win}
§ _{denotes unanimous win}

Multiple award winners

Honorary Palme d'Or

In 2002 the festival began to sporadically award a non-competitive Honorary Palme d'Or to directors who had achieved a notable body of work but who had never won a competitive Palme d'Or. In 2011 the festival announced that the award would be given out annually, however plans for this fell through and it was not awarded again until four years later in 2015. American director Woody Allen was the inaugural recipient while pioneering French filmmaker Agnès Varda was the first woman to receive the award in 2015. In 2016 Jean-Pierre Léaud became the first person to be awarded solely for acting.