The only directors to have won multiple Palme d’Or awards at Cannes
The Palme d’Or is the most-coveted prize on offering at the Cannes Film Festival each year. Prior to its introduction in 1955, film directors had competed mostly for the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, but suddenly there was a new award that became highly sought after. The Palme d’Or was replaced at the top of the pile once again by the Grand Prix between 1964 and 1975 but has remained in its place since then.
Winning the Palme d’Or is considered one of the greatest achievements a film director can accomplish in their career, and only nine filmmakers in history have been fortunate enough to win more than one. Let’s take a closer look at those lucky few now.
The earliest of those directors is Francis Ford Coppola, who first won the award in 1974 for his mystery thriller film The Conversation starring Gene Hackman and John Cazale, which focuses on a surveillance expert whose recordings unveil a murder. Coppola then followed up on his 1974 win in 1979 with his Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando.
There were just four years between Bille August’s two Palme d’Or awards. The Danish director first took home the highly-coveted prize in 1988 for his epic movie Pelle the Conqueror, which was based on Martin Anderson Nexø’s 1910 novel of the same name. It was just a short time before August was once again recognised in 1992 for The Best Intentions.
The only Asian director to have been awarded more than one Palme d’Or is Shohei Imamura. It was his 1983 The Ballad of Narayama that first earned Imamura the biggest recognition at Cannes, but he had to wait until 1997 before he took the prize home once more for his film The Eel, which was loosely based on Akira Yoshimura’s novel One Parole and also took motifs from his own 1966 film The Pornographers.
An English director also finds his way onto the list of multiple Palme d’Or winners, our very own Ken Loach. It was in 2006 that Loach scooped the award for his film The Wind That Shakes the Barley, set in the Irish War of Independence of 1919-1921. Loach then doubled up on his awards ten years later in 2016 for his magnificent drama I, Daniel Blake.
The list is rounded off by the Serbian director Emir Kusturica, who won the Palme d’Or in 1985 for When Father Was Away on Business and in 1995 for Underground, the Dardenne brothers, who took home the award in 1999 and 2005 for Rosetta and L’Enfant respectively, and Ruben Östlund, the most recent recipient of the prize, who first won in 2017 for The Square and last year for Triangle of Sadness.
The only multiple Palme d’Or winners:
- Francis Ford Coppola
- Bille August
- Emir Kusturica
- Shohei Imamura
- Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
- Michael Haneke
- Ken Loach
- Ruben Östlund
