Claire Denis to Receive Carrosse D’Or Award at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight
Director Claire Denis is set to receive the honorary Golden Carriage (Carrosse d’Or) award at the upcoming Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, as announced by the French Directors’ Guild (SRF).
Established in 2002, this prestigious award honors filmmakers whose unique vision and directing style have profoundly influenced the cinematic landscape.
In its official announcement, the SRF board praised Denis, stating, “From Chocolat to Stars at Noon, from Beau Travail to High Life, your films offer a cinema that breathes, touches, and questions, allowing the world to reveal itself in all its complexity and power.”
The board further lauded her directing style for its “sensory precision and radical freedom,” highlighting her ability to challenge aesthetic conventions and narrative norms. “Film after film, you have built a cinema of friction and uncertainty, where the world reveals itself in all its complexity, at times its violence, but also its power of emancipation,” they noted.
Denis’s work is recognized for its political depth, skillfully addressing colonial legacies, borders, identities, and desires with rigorous formality while affirming cinema as a vibrant art form. “Your work, profoundly political without ever resorting to illustration, interrogates colonial legacies, borders, identities, and desires with formal rigor and absolute faith in cinema as an art of the present,” the SRF wrote.
A familiar face at Cannes, Denis’s film Stars at Noon garnered the Grand Prize at the festival’s main competition in 2022. Additionally, her drama Let The Sunshine In, featuring Juliette Binoche, was showcased in the 2017 Directors’ Fortnight, where it won the SACD Prize.
Denis follows in the footsteps of 2025 honoree Todd Haynes, joining the ranks of illustrious recipients including Clint Eastwood, Nanni Moretti, Ousmane Sembene, David Cronenberg, Jane Campion, Alain Resnais, Jia Zhang-ke, Aki Kaurismäki, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, and others.
She will be presented with the Golden Carriage during the opening ceremony of Directors’ Fortnight on May 13.
