Claire Denis will receive the Carrosse d’Or Award on May 13, 2026, in Cannes, during the Directors’ Fortnight opening ceremony. Established in 2002, this award honors a filmmaker whose freedom of vision and strength of direction have profoundly influenced cinema. Kelly Reichardt and Todd Haynes are some of our recent favorite recipients.
“From Chocolat to Stars at Noon, from Beau Travail to 35 rhums, from Trouble Every Day to High Life, your cinema has continually explored territories – geographic, intimate and political – where relations of domination, desire, memory and exile are played out. Your work is marked by a rare attentiveness to bodies, silences and gestures, to what circulates between beings rather than to what is spoken. Your direction, characterized by sensory precision and radical freedom, has constantly reinvented itself, refusing aesthetic categorization as well as conventional narratives. Film after film, you have built a cinema of friction and uncertainty, where the world reveals itself in all its complexity – sometimes in its violence, but also in its emancipatory power. Your work, profoundly political without ever yielding to illustration, has opened unprecedented spaces of representation, questioning colonial legacies, borders, identities and desires with formal rigor and an absolute trust in cinema as an art of the present.“
