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The Swedish satire Triangle of Sadness, directed by Ruben Östlund, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. It was the director’s second Palme d’Or, after his 2017 film The Square, a satire on the contemporary art world.
The Palme d’Or is considered one of the most prestigious awards in the film industry. It is awarded to the film adjudged the best among those contending at the Cannes Film Festival. Cannes is one of the “big five” international film festivals — the other four being the Venice Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival.
The award’s history
Palme d’Or translates to ‘The Golden Palm’. But this honour at Cannes went through multiple iterations before taking its present form.
The first Cannes festival was held in 1939, then delayed until 1946 because of World War II. The top prize in 1946, then called the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, was awarded to one film from each of the participating countries – including India. Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar is the only Indian film to win the award, itself never released in India. In 1955, by which time the award was being given to only one film, it was renamed Palme d’Or and given to Delbert Mann’s Marty. In 1964, the award’s name was changed back to the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film; in 1975, it became the Palme d’Or once again.
What it looks like
After the 1954 festival, jewellers were invited to design an award that would reflect Cannes’s coat of arms and the palm trees lining the Promenade de la Croisette — the road with the convention centre that hosts Cannes every year. The original design was done by Parisian jeweller Lucienne Lazon.
The current design is by Caroline Scheufele and “made of 24-carat gold, is hand-cast into a wax mold, then affixed to a cushion of a single piece of cut crystal and is now presented in a case of blue Morocco leather”, according to the festival’s website.
Milestones & trivia
Nine directors have ever won the Palme twice, a circle known as “double Palmes”. Before Ruben Östlund (2017 and 2022) were Francis Ford Coppola (1974 and 1979), Shoei Imamura (1983 and 1997), Bille August (1988 and 1992), Emir Kusturica (1985 and 1995), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (1999 and 2005), Michael Haneke (2009 and 2012), and Ken Loach (2006 and 2016).
Jane Campion and Julia Ducournau are the only women to have won the Palme, for The Piano (1993) and Titane (2021) respectively. Mann’s Marty (1955), Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1946), and Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite (2019), are the only three films to have won both the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for Best Picture.
