The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (French: Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) won the Palme d'Or at the 17th Cannes Film Festival in May 1964, beating among others Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. The film also earned five Academy Award nominations at the 38th ceremony in 1966, including Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Song for the central Je ne pourrai jamais vivre sans toi.

The film is the second of Demy's loose Cherbourg trilogy with composer Michel Legrand, after Lola (1961) and before The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). The trilogy's distinctive form (every line of dialogue sung to Legrand's continuous score) is widely considered one of the defining innovations of European postwar musical cinema, with no significant predecessor and a substantial subsequent influence on Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the wider through-sung musical tradition.

The cast is led by Catherine Deneuve in her breakthrough role at age twenty (Demy and Deneuve would work together again on The Young Girls of Rochefort) and Nino Castelnuovo in the male lead. Almost the entire production is shot in real locations around Cherbourg in Normandy, with the colour palette designed by Demy and his wife and frequent collaborator Agnès Varda, every interior was painted in saturated complementary colours specifically for the production, with the wallpaper, costume design and umbrella props themselves all coordinated to the cinematography by Jean Rabier. The Martin Scorsese-supervised restoration, premiered at Cannes in 2013, is now the standard reference version.