Which director has won the most Palmes d’Or at Cannes?
For any movie director who considers their work art, the Palme d’Or prize for the best film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival is the greatest form of recognition they could receive from their peers.
And yet, many of the most renowned directors in history have never won the award for one of their films. Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, and John Ford are just four of the great auteurs who have never claimed a Palme d’Or. Ingmar Bergman only received an honorary version of the prize in 1997, with none of his masterpieces ever nabbing the annual prize.
On the other hand, just a small few directors have been lucky enough to receive multiple Palmes d’Or. Eight single filmmakers and two co-directors have had this honour. All ten have been men.
The most recent of these multiple winners is Swedish director Ruben Östlund, who received his second award in 2022 for the English-language black comedy Triangle of Sadness. Meanwhile, British director Ken Loach was the penultimate recipient of a second Palme d’Or for his 2015 film I, Daniel Blake. Loach directed two of only ten British movies ever to have won the prize. His other winning film was 2006’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a war epic about the partition of Ireland starring Cillian Murphy.
Has anyone ever won more than two Palme d’Or?
Quite simply, no. However, that could all be about to change next week, as Francis Ford Coppola’s latest movie, Megalopolis, is in the running for the 2024 Palme d’Or. Coppola has already won the award twice before, for 1974’s The Conversation and 1979’s Apocalypse Now.
Sci-fi epic Megalopolis centres on the destruction of an empire, with allegorical parallels to Ancient Rome. It seems to tap into contemporary themes such as the climate crisis, social unrest over inequality and wars, and the relative decline of the United States as the world’s undisputed superpower.
Aside from Coppola, Loach and Östlund, seven other directors have won the Palme d’Or twice. They are, in chronological order:
- Alf Sjöberg, for Torment and Miss Julie
- Billie August, for Pelle the Conqueror and The Best Intentions
- Emir Kusturica, for When Father Was Away on Business and Underground
- Shōhei Imamura, for The Ballad of Narayama and The Eel
- Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, for Rosetta and L’Enfant
- Michael Haneke, for The White Ribbon and Amour
Alf Sjöberg was the first double-winner, winning his second Palme d’Or way back in 1951. Back then, however, the prize was not yet officially known as the Palme d’Or and was shared among multiple winners each year.
The total list of ten multi-winning film directors includes two Swedish, one American, one Bosnian, one Japanese, two French, one British and one Austrian. The Godfather director will be hoping he has a list of all his own by May 25th.
