Our Favorite Palme d'Or Winners at Cannes

The Cannes Film Festival kicked off this week, so here's our favorites that have won the top prize there in the past

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May 20, 2022

Cannes is likely the most prestigious film festival in the world and its top prize, the Palme d’Or, is one of the highest honors a film can receive. The 2022 edition of the festival kicked off this week – premiering new work from David Cronenberg, Park Chan-wook, Kelly Reichardt, Claire Denis, James Gray, and more – so today we are taking a look at some of our favorites that have won the Palme d’Or in the past, which has been handed out at Cannes since 1955.

Check out the “From the DYLA Archive” section below to see more Palme d’Or winners we have recommended in the past. Read, subscribe, and enjoy your weekend!

Billy recommends…

Paris, Texas

I love a linear story that doesn’t spend the extra effort to give you context for the previous events not seen on screen too early. A temptation of many directors is to give context up front to set up the trajectory. Here, our lens into the main character, Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), makes clear the grief and aimlessness he has. Our opening look at Travis is him staggering through the wilderness with seemingly no destination in sight. Something has broken him and this movie is a melancholy but sweet story that uses the American mythos as an enticing yet fragmented backdrop.

Our drifter was a once-married man with a child. Now he is, by choice, wandering through the desert dealing with his loss. What a simple and enticing premise, but hardly feels like a premise that could be elevated to a Palme d’Or winner. Director Wim Wenders and writer Sam Shepard are able to achieve this by showcasing three incredibly different sectors of society and personality: The classic American family, nomad lifestyle, and the sex industry.

Wenders lends a completely empathetic approach to it all, but is definitely skeptical of the “white picket fence” family and the way they deal/cover up trauma in their own lives. The Palme d’Or does not normally go to such a serene and calming film. By the end you will be conflicted about the decisions our characters made. Not because any of them are hurtful or wrong, but because there is a clear sacrifice that leaves the ending in flux between calm and nervousness.

Streaming on HBO Max and Criterion Channel

Drew recommends…

The Piano

If only all Oscar-nominated prestige period dramas could have the risky storytelling and haunting beauty of The Piano. Back in 1993, the Cannes Film Festival had never bestowed its top prize on a film directed by a female… until this rich, complex, and masterful tale of a mute woman traveling to the New Zealand frontier with her young daughter for an arranged marriage in the mid-1800s. While the story may sound like the makings of staid and predictable “Oscar bait,” writer-director Jane Campion had something much more surprising and tumultuous up her sleeve.

The Piano was such a cinematic sensation that, in addition to taking the Palme d’Or at Cannes, it was a major player at the Academy Awards that year. Campion was recently back in the awards conversation when she earned a Best Director Oscar for The Power of the Dog, but she won her first Oscar for The Piano, picking up Best Original Screenplay. Holly Hunter, who plays the mute main character Ada, won Best Actress and an 11-year-old Anna Paquin, as Ada’s spitfire of a daughter, won Best Supporting Actress.

Excellently acted – with great supporting turns from Harvey Keitel and Sam Neill – and gorgeously filmed on location in New Zealand, The Piano undoubtedly took Cannes by storm due to these aspects, but also because its subject matter defies taboo and keeps you guessing. Ada and her daughter are shipped from Scotland to New Zealand for an arranged marriage with an obstinate man named Alisdair (Neill). He doesn’t understand that Ada, while she doesn’t speak, expresses herself through her piano. But another man in town, George Baines (Keitel), does and he eventually pursues her romantically under the pretense of piano lessons.

The social and sexual politics of The Piano are far from straightforward, but that’s what makes it such a fascinating film to analyze and consider. All of the characters are written and performed with nuance and shading and the story turns down unexpected avenues. Campion’s female characters have been some of the most intricate and thoughtful of the last few decades in movies, and The Piano is when people started to notice she was a major talent.

Available to rent digitally on demand