Director Peter Jackson, the man behind the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, will be honoured with an honorary Palme d’Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, which will take place from May 12 to 23, 2026.
“Receiving the honorary Palme d’Or in Cannes will be one of the greatest moments of my career,” the 64-year-old director said in a statement from the Festival.
The president of the festival, Iris Knobloch, was delighted to welcome the “director with the overflowing creativity who has given the heroic fantasy genre its letters of nobility”.
“A before and after Peter Jackson”
On May 13, 2001, at the Palais des Festivals, 26 minutes will change the life of the still rather confidential director: the exclusive broadcast, seven months before its release, of the first images of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”, the beginning of the cinema saga with 17 Oscars, adapted from the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien.
“The cinema of excess is his trademark and his particularly ambitious total art of entertainment,” noted General Delegate Thierry Frémaux, who believes that there is “clearly a before and after Peter Jackson.”
From World War One to the Beatles
For the past 12 years, and “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies”, Peter Jackson has not produced any fiction, devoting himself to documentaries such as the World War One tribute, “They Shall Not Grow Old” and the highly-rated trilogy “The Beatles: Get Back”.
(Michael Leahy. Source: CNews. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)