Every May, the Cannes Film Festival awards the Palme d’Or, cinema’s most coveted prize, a literal golden palm handed to the year’s best film. And every May, a much smaller crowd gathers, often on the beach, to award something else entirely: the Palm Dog, given to the best canine performance of the festival. The trophy is not a golden anything. It’s a dog collar. That tells you most of what you need to know about the spirit of the thing, but not why it’s worth paying attention to.
Because here’s the quiet truth beneath the gag: the Palm Dog keeps honoring dogs who genuinely carry their films. The award is a joke. The performances often aren’t. And the winners, year after year, make a case that a great dog on screen is a piece of craft, not a happy accident.
What the Palm Dog actually is
Start with the disclaimer the award makes about itself. Despite the red-carpet trappings, the Palm Dog is not an official part of Cannes. The festival has run since 1946; the Palm Dog was dreamed up in 2001 by British film journalist Toby Rose, as a cheeky sidebar riffing on the Palme d’Or. It has no jury of festival grandees and no place in the official program. What it has is staying power, a devoted following, and those collars, handed out to dogs for their contributions to film.
Over the years it’s grown its own little ecosystem of honors, including a Grand Jury Prize for a runner-up, and its ceremonies have become a genuine fixture of the festival’s lighter side, complete with winning dogs doing tricks and generally upstaging everyone. It is, in the best way, the least self-important thing at one of the most self-serious events on the cultural calendar.
The winners who made the case
A few recent champions show why the joke keeps landing.
In 2023, the prize went to Messi, a Border Collie who many argued was the true star of the Oscar-nominated courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall. Messi’s win kicked off a genuine awards-season fascination with the dog, proof that a canine performance could become part of the conversation around a serious, adult film.
The following year raised the bar for showmanship. The 2024 Palm Dog went to Kodi, a Griffon mix then nearing ten years old, for playing Cosmos in Dog on Trial, a Swiss-French courtroom comedy. Kodi’s off-screen antics became part of the legend: he was reportedly barred from further red-carpet appearances after getting a little too amorous with the director’s leg during interviews, which, by the logic of showbiz, only made him more of an icon. The festival’s Grand Jury Prize that year went to Xin, a Jack Russell and Greyhound mix, for the Chinese film Black Dog. At the beachside ceremony, the winners reportedly soaked up the attention, with Kodi doing tricks on his hind legs to music.
Why the winning film mattered more than the bit
Dog on Trial, Kodi’s vehicle, is a useful example of how these “silly” wins often point at something real. The film’s premise is deceptively heavy: a dog faces a courtroom that will decide whether he should be put down after a biting incident, with a sympathetic lawyer arguing for his life. Its director, Laetitia Dosch, has said she built the story from real criminal cases involving dogs and their owners, drawn to how passionately whole communities could rally, with petitions and demonstrations, around a single animal’s fate.
Dosch has framed the film around a genuinely thorny question: what happens to justice if a dog is treated not as a thing but as a someone? It’s a fitting film to have premiered in France, which was an early mover in recognizing animals as sentient beings in its laws rather than mere property. A Palm Dog, in other words, can be pure fun and still sit on top of a movie wrestling with animal rights. That’s the award’s sneaky range.
What’s new: the 2025 winner and the ceremony ahead
The tradition rolls on. The 2025 Palm Dog went to Panda, an Icelandic Sheepdog whose performance in The Love That Remains, directed by Hlynur Pálmason, won over the jury. Panda couldn’t attend in person, so, in the kind of detail that makes this award what it is, her people sent a recorded video of her “accepting” the honor, a red bandana stitched with “Palm Dog 2025” in gold thread, while a canine stand-in named Lola collected the prize on the beach.
With another Cannes on the horizon, the smart money says the Palm Dog will do exactly what it’s done for more than two decades: pluck a scene-stealing dog out of the world’s most prestigious film festival, drape a collar on them, and remind everyone that sometimes the best performance in the room has four legs and no idea it’s famous. Keep an eye on the beach.
