ABOUT
THE HUMANN PRIZE
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Created in 2024 by Rosalie Mann, the Humann Prize is an honorary distinction presented each year by No More Plastic Foundation during the Positive Cinema Week, organized under the auspices of the Cannes Film Festival. It celebrates individuals who place their influence and public voice at the service of environmental or social causes in order to create lasting and meaningful change in society.
This prize reflects our commitment to honoring those who inspire significant transformation, thoughtful reflection, and collective action toward a better future.
In a world often overshadowed by the relentless pursuit of progress and profit, it is profoundly necessary to refocus on what truly matters: our humanity.
It is in this spirit that I created the Humann Prize, to honor and elevate the essential human values of courage, integrity, impact, and action.
The Humann Prize is more than an award; it is a call for change. It celebrates remarkable individuals who have courageously used their influence and their voice to champion initiatives that benefit our society or our planet.
These are individuals who look beyond the horizon, who understand that true progress cannot be measured solely by material gains, but by the positive impact we have on the world around us.
The Humann Prize aims to spark a global conversation about the power of ethical leadership. It serves as a beacon, encouraging others to reflect deeply on the legacy they wish to leave behind.
Our laureates embody the spirit of innovation and altruism, demonstrating that when we unite, the challenges we face are not insurmountable.
This prize stands as a testament to our unwavering commitment to promoting initiatives that inspire meaningful change, stimulate reflection, and encourage collective action.
Through this prize, we aspire to build a future where human values are not only recognized but embraced as the pillars of global development.”
- Rosalie Mann
Founder of the Humann Prize
"It is not excellence, exactly. Excellence belongs to systems: to schools, to markets, to algorithms that sort and rank and declare winners with a confidence no human being has ever truly possessed. Nor is it virtue, which tends to collapse under scrutiny, revealing itself to be either performance or accident, or both.
The Human Prize, if it is to mean anything at all, concerns itself with something more elusive: impact. But not the kind that can be measured without embarrassment.
We are very good, these days, at counting what can be counted: followers, revenue, lives “reached,” carbon offset, minutes saved. We build elaborate architectures to house these numbers, and then we live inside them, mistaking the structure for the world.
But the Human Prize gestures toward what resists such accounting.
It asks: what has been altered in the texture of being human because this person existed?
This is, admittedly, an inconvenient question.
Because genuine impact on humanity is rarely pure. It is tangled in contradiction, compromised by context, refracted through power and privilege. The same act can liberate one group and constrain another. The same innovation can extend life and diminish it, depending on where you stand. To honor “significant impact” is therefore to accept ambiguity — to recognize that humanity itself is not a stable object but a shifting, contested field — to pause, collectively, and say: here, something happened that altered us.
The Human Prize, then, is less a reward than a lens, sharpening our sense of where humanity has been extended, protected, or reimagined.
It asks us to look again at the familiar, but the rare — at care, at courage, at imagination — and to notice their consequences, however dispersed.
And perhaps, in doing so, it implicates us. Because once you begin to see impact in this way — as accumulation, as entanglement — the question shifts, uncomfortably, from them to you. What, after all, have you changed?"
- Hamilton Mann
Member of the Board
