Loading ...Screen Daily - Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre Les Murs) has taken this year’s Palme d’Or.
The film is a Paris classroom drama-documentary based on a novel by Francois Begaudeau, who plays a teacher in the film working in a tough Parisian neighbourhood.
Screen’s four-star review describes it as offering “a rich microcosm of today’s multi-ethnic French population.”
Jury president Sean Penn said the decision to give the award to Cantet’s “amazing, amazing film” was unanimous.
It was the first Palme D’Or win for a French film since Maurice Pialat’s Sous Le Soleil De Satan in 1987.
The jury Grand Prix went to Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah. Screen described the film as “probably the most authentic and unsentimental mafia movie ever to come out of Italy”.
The Jury Prize was won by Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, which Screen described as “enjoyably original, lurid, sardonic political opera.”
Best director was Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Three Monkeys.
Steve McQueen’s Hunger about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands took the Camera d’Or prize.
Benicio Del Toro won best actor for Steven Soderbergh’s Che (click for review), while Sandra Corveloni won best actress for Linha De Passe… [Full Story]
Cinematical - Adoration, the newest film by critically acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan, is a beautifully evocative film, though some may find its convoluted storyline distracting. In many respects, the film very much evokes one of my favorite films, The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan’s 1997 Palme d’Or and Oscar nominee*. Where The Sweet Hereafter dealt with the impact of guilt and grief in a small community following a tragic school bus accident, in Adoration Egoyan deals with grief and loss on a more personal level, while also blending in ideas about the subjective nature of reality and identity in a technological age. In a world where who we are can be invented, reinvented, and broadcast to the world via chat rooms and virtual reality avatars, can we ever really know another person — or even ourselves?
