Claire Denis To Receive Carrosse D’Or Cannes Directors’ Fortnight

Claire Denis will be feted with the honorary Golden Carriage (Carrosse d’Or) award at the upcoming edition of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, its parent body the French Directors’ Guild (SRF) has announced.

Launched in 2002, the prize celebrates filmmakers whose liberated vision and directing style has “deeply marked” cinema.

“From Chocolat to Stars at Noon, from Beau Travail to High Life, your films offer a cinema that breathes, touches, and questions, and in which each shot becomes a space for experience and emotion, and where the world reveals itself in all its complexity and power,” the SRF board wrote in its traditional public letter setting out its motivations for selecting the honoree.

“Your directing, with its sensory precision and radical freedom, has never ceased to reinvent itself, rejecting both aesthetic conventions and conventional narratives. Film after film, you have built a cinema of friction and uncertainty, where the world reveals itself in all its complexity, its violence at times, but also its power of emancipation,” continued the body.

“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.”

Denis is a Cannes regular with her film Stars at Noon winning the Grand Prize in the main festival’s competition in 2022.

The filmmaker also strong Directors’ Fortnight connections, with her drama Let The Sunshine In, starring Juliette Binoche, playing in the 2017 edition and winning the SACD Prize that year.

Denis follows in the footsteps of 2025 honoree Todd Haynes, with other recipients including Clint Eastwood, Nanni Moretti, Ousmane Sembene, David Cronenberg, Jane Campion, Alain Resnais, Jia Zhang-ke, Aki Kaurismäki, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, John Carpenter, Frederick Wiseman,  Souleymane Cissé, Kelly Reichardt and Andrea Arnold.

Denis will be presented with the Golden Carriage during the opening ceremony of Directors’ Fortnight on May 13.