Why splitting the Palme d’Or is a Cannes rarity — and how the rules force a single winner

The Palme d’Or is engineered to crown one film. When audiences ask why Cannes so rarely splits its top award between two titles, the answer lies less in jury temperament than in architecture: the competition is built to deliver a single, unambiguous verdict on the year in cinema. A shared Palme — ex aequo, two films holding the same trophy — is precisely the exception the system is designed to prevent.

That design rests on one quietly decisive rule. Under the festival’s regulations, the film that takes the Palme cannot also collect any other competitive prize — the so-called one-film-one-prize principle — and the top award is steered away from ties to begin with. A jury that loves two films therefore faces a forced choice: give the Palme to one and route the other toward the Grand Prix, the Jury Prize, or a directing or acting award. The structure pushes consensus toward a single name rather than a divided crown.

History shows how seldom juries breach that wall. In the modern era the top prize has been shared only seven times, most recently in 1997, when Shohei Imamura’s The Eel and Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry left the Croisette as co-laureates. Earlier ties read like a roll call of standoffs no jury could resolve: Francis Ford Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now beside Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum in 1979, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz tied with Akira Kurosawa‘s Kagemusha in 1980, Jane Campion’s The Piano with Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine in 1993. Each split marked a year when two visions were judged genuinely inseparable — and nearly three decades have since passed without another.

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The lesser awards, by contrast, are made to flex. Best Director, Best Actor and the Grand Prix have all been handed out ex aequo, which is why juries determined to honor more than one film push the sharing downward, away from the Palme. The most celebrated workaround came in 2013, when the jury gave Blue Is the Warmest Colour to its director and both lead actresses at once — a deliberate route around the no-other-prize rule. MCM’s account of the 2026 Cannes prizes captured the same logic in miniature: the jury split Best Director between Los Javis and Paweł Pawlikowski while leaving the Palme — Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord — undivided.

That is the real function of the Palme’s singularity. It forces a jury of artists to commit to one film as the year’s defining gesture, with no hedging and no shared credit. The rarity of the split is not an accident of taste but the prize doing exactly what it was built to do — compressing twelve days of competition into a single name, read aloud once.

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