cannes winners

[stephen smerdon]

Winners of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival

By Mali Elfman


The 2009 Cannes Film Festival has come to an end and some films have achieved massive success and awards, and others will be disappearing into independent film limbo. Although I’m sure we’ll talk about those films in our Cannes Film Festival roundup, for now, let’s concentrate on the Cannes successes. Below are the winners of both prizes and distribution.

• The Grand Prix (aka the runner-up to the Palme d’Or ) went to Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet
• The Special Jury Prize went to Alain Resnais for Wild Grass
• Jury Prize Ex-aequo went to Fish Tank directed by Andrea Arnold
• Best Director to Brillante Mendoza for Kinatay
• Best Screenplay goes to LOU Ye for Chun Feng Chen Zui De Ye Wan (Spring Fever)
• Christoph Walz won Best Actor for his performance in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds
• Charlotte Gainsbourg won Best Actress for Lars von Trier’s controversial Antichrist
• Vulcain Prize for an artist technician, awarded by the C.S.T. went to Map of the Sounds of Tokyo directed by Isabel Coixet
• Their lifetime achievement award went to Alain Resnais for his work in Esnais Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass)

The winners of the the most prestigious award, the Palme d’Or, is Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s luscious black and white French film, The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band) about life in a small Protestant village in northern Germany just before the advent of World War I.
According to Reuters:

The film is narrated by its central character, a young teacher, decades after the events depicted. Though the many children all have names, the adults, further extending the film’s symbolic implications, tend to be known mostly through their generic roles, e.g., the Baron, the Pastor, the Farmer, the Doctor, and so on. Life in the village is strictly hierarchical, and everyone knows his or her place. An inhuman, never questioned moral code holds sway, especially over the children who are constantly punished, both physically and psychologically, for the slightest infraction. The women are similarly brutalized and under the thumb of the village’s unabashed patriarchy. The male adults, on the other hand, engage in clandestine acts of evil and cruelty that are kept hushed up.

One day the order of things begins to unravel. First, the doctor, on horseback, is tripped up by an invisible wire and his injuries put him in the hospital for months. Then several children, including the son of the Baron and the retarded child of the doctor’s mistress, are severely beaten. Later, the Baron’s barn is set on fire. Who are the guilty ones? It is the teacher who finally figures out, to the surprise of no one, that it is the children that are wreaking the havoc, partly out of revenge for their mistreatment, and partly because they have so totally internalized the sick values of their parents.

In case you were wondering what films from Cannes that you’ll be able to see in coming months, check out the Cannes tittles with US Distribution below:

• Antichrist (IFC)
• A Prophet (Sony Pictures Classics)
• Bright Star (Bob Berney and Bill Polhad)
• Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (Sony Pictures Classics)
• Drag Me to Hell (Universal)
• Humpday (Magnolia Pictures)
• I Love You Phillip Morris (Consolidated Pictures Group)
• Inglourious Basterds (Weinstein Co.)
• Looking For Eric (IFC)
• Precious (Lionsgate)
• Taking Woodstock (Focus Features)
• Tales From the Golden Age (IFC)
• Thirst (Focus Features)
• Up (Disney Pixar)
• The White Ribbon (Sony Pictures Classics)

Check out the full list of winners on Cannes Festival website now.

[Dendrite]

There are so many films I really really want to see that were at Cannes. Anti-Christ, and Inglourious Basterds are high up on that list! Drag Me To Hell is out in a few days here, suppose to be Sam Raimi back on form in his horror element.

The Korean film Thirst isn't even out here yet, and already it's getting interest off people who want to remake it... all the films from this wonderful director are getting an American remake, except Cyborg. It's mad.

Bla.

[Bartkolounger]

I've heard Anti-Christ is violent for the sake of being violent which kind of turns me off in a way. I don't think it will live up to the hype as a "good film"

I would like to see the $70 Zombie flick "Colin" though...

[Dendrite]

AntiChrist is Lars von Trier, and his film Dancer in the Dark is one of my all time favourites(totally different I know, but be good to see what he can do with extreme horror and it looks beautiful in some scenes, saw some visuals and it looked like a fairytale compared to the horror side), so I'm there for any of his films, and I think Charlotte Gainsbourg is fantastic in films, she won the Best Actress award for AntiChrist at Cannes.

As for Colin, it looks interesting but I will be giving it a miss unless I want to be suffering from extreme motion sickness with that filming style. £70 is good, if true.

[Bartkolounger]

I will take Colins motion sickness over Anti-Christs Female genital mutilation.

Apparently the $70 they spent on Colin was for coffee and a crowbar everything else was donated or found/left over from other shoots that various cast/crew members had worked on.
The make-up is left over latex from x-men apparently

[Dendrite]

It must be very graphic and close up to cause such a fuss, I've seen FGM in other films, one involving fish hooks, another was a photo montage of surgery close up. Don't remember fuss then.

I still take AntiChrist over shaky camera for a whole film.