Prix Louis Delluc
The Prix Louis Delluc, established in 1937 and named for the pioneering French filmmaker and critic Louis Delluc, is one of the oldest and most prestigious film awards in France, presented annually to the best French film of the year as judged by a jury composed entirely of film critics - a composition that distinguishes it from industry-voted awards and gives it a distinctly critical rather than commercial character. The award is announced each December, timing it at the end of the French film calendar year and positioning it as a critical capstone to the season.
Louis Delluc himself was a formative figure in French cinema's intellectual self-definition. A film critic and theorist active in the 1910s and early 1920s before his death at age 33 in 1924, Delluc argued for cinema as an art form deserving serious critical and philosophical attention at a time when most of the cultural establishment considered it a fairground novelty. He coined the concept of "photogenie" - the idea that cinema could capture a quality of presence or inner life in objects and faces that no other art form could replicate. Naming France's premier critics' award after him is an acknowledgment that film criticism itself, not just filmmaking, has been essential to cinema's artistic development.
The award is governed by a jury of working French film critics who vote after screening eligible French films released during the year. The critical composition of the jury means the prize has a different relationship to the market than awards voted by industry professionals: critics assess films by standards that do not automatically align with commercial success, box-office performance, or production prestige. A Prix Louis Delluc winner may be a film that struggled at the box office but achieved something formally or thematically that demanded recognition.
France has one of the world's richest national cinema traditions, encompassing the New Wave, the poetic realism of the 1930s, the French New Extremity of the 2000s, and the ongoing contemporary production that generates dozens of internationally recognized films annually. The Prix Louis Delluc has, across its nearly nine decades of existence, recognized films across the full range of that tradition. While the award's prestige-critical orientation means it typically favors dramatic cinema over overt genre productions, the French critical tradition has never been dismissive of genre - the New Wave directors who became the most celebrated French filmmakers of the 20th century were themselves deeply formed by American genre cinema, particularly crime et noir films.
The French New Extremity, which produced internationally significant horreur et thriller films in the first decade of the 2000s, engaged seriously with genre mechanics while maintaining the formal ambition that French critical culture values. Films operating in that space - using psychological-horror or thriller structures to conduct investigations into bodily experience, social violence, or existential crisis - represent exactly the kind of category-crossing work that a critics' award like the Prix Louis Delluc is positioned to recognize when it encounters it.
The award has a companion prize for best first film, the Prix Louis Delluc du Premier Film, which provides additional recognition for debut directors and is often where adventurous or unconventional work finds recognition when the main jury trends toward established filmmakers. Many significant French careers have received their first major recognition through this category.
For the CaSTV catalog, the Prix Louis Delluc matters as a historical reference point for French cinema's critical self-assessment and as one of the contexts in which French genre-adjacent filmmaking has occasionally received establishment recognition. Its nearly ninety years of continuous operation make it one of the oldest surviving film awards in the world, and its critic-jury composition gives it a perspective on French cinema that complements the industry-voted Cesar Awards and the international visibility of Cannes.
