Behind the scenes: making of the Cannes Palme d'Or
The most coveted prize for filmmakers around the world, the Palme d'Or, is a piece of jewellery, which takes hours to make every year. In this story AFP reports on how it is made:
MEYRIN, Switzerland, May 9, 2026 (AFP) - The Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, takes more than 40 hours of meticulous craftsmanship to produce at Swiss jeweller Chopard's workshops outside Geneva. Since its creation in 1955, the Palme d'Or has constantly evolved. Its current form was conceived in 1998 by Caroline Scheufele, co-president of Chopard.
The luxury watchmaking and jewellery house makes all the trophies awarded by the jury during the world's most prestigious film festival, which takes over Cannes on the southwest French coast. "What we brought to the table, which is very different from the original, is that the stem of the Palme d'Or ends in a small heart shape, which is a bit of a nod to cinema, the love for cinema," Scheufele told AFP ahead of the 2026 edition, adding that she designs "a lot of jewellery with hearts". At the workshop in Meyrin, a Geneva suburb on the French border, creating the Palme d'Or begins with the casting technique.
This involves creating a model of the stem with its leaves in wax within a rubber mold, which is then immersed in liquid plas-ter.
The plaster is heated to 760C, causing the wax to melt away, leaving an impression into which molten metal is injected.
Once solidified, the piece is extracted by dissolving the mold, then cleaned and treated to remove any impurities. Next comes the assembly.
The various parts are reworked, hand-polished, and carefully at-tached: each gold leaf is fitted and soldered onto the stem. After a final polish, the Palme d'Or is mounted on a precisely drilled rock crystal cushion and then secured, creating a dis-play-ready piece.
The Palme d'Or is made of 118 grammes of yellow 18 carat gold which rests on the crystal cushion, shaped like an emerald-cut diamond.
"The appeal of rock crystal is that... the base is always slight-ly different, so each year the Palme d'Or has a slightly differ-ent look," said Scheufele. Chopard makes two Palme d'Or awards for Cannes each year -- in case of a tie or unforeseen circumstances.
The prize goes to the director of the best feature film. Previous winning filmmakers include Luis Bunuel, Jane Campion, Federico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Akira Kurosawa, Emir Kusturica, David Lean, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Quentin Tarantino, Mar-tin Scorsese Orson Welles and Jafar Panahi.
