Jornal da Mostra
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Edição:
Renata de Almeida e Leon Cakoff
Golden Palm awarded to Ken Loach lays emphasis on style and content in film making
The Grand Prize from the Jury, second in ranking among awards, went to French director Bruno Dumont with his film "Flandres" focusing on the mechanical brutality among youngsters alternately in the country and on stage in an indistinct war in some country of Arab culture - a masterpiece of a film.
The prize for Best Script went to Spanish icon Pedro Almodóvar for "Volver", also awarded a controversial collective prize for Best Actress to include several actresses of varying professional demeanor, namely Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo, and Chus Lampreave - a prize to acknowledge all that is feminine in Almodóvar`s films.
The prize for Best Director went to Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu for "Babel". With Loach, Almodóvar and Dumont, Wong Kar Wai`s jury showed their respect for author cinema focusing on content, to the detriment of cinema rich in form but empty in content such as U.S. Sophia Coppola`s "Marie Antoinette", which was booed down.
Also collective and original was the prize for Best Actor for the actors in "Indigènes", by Rachid Bouchareb, on the part played of undisclosed hardship for thousands of youngsters from what, at the time, were French Arab colonies - soldiers who fought and died in Europe to halt the advance of the Nazis. Award-winners were Jamel Debbouze, Sammy Nacéri, Sami Bouajila, Roschdy Zem, and Bernard Blancan.
The last prize awarded by the jury to features went to English director Andrea Arnold and her thriller "Red Road". This is one of the latest from Danish film maker Lars Von Trier, acknowledged by the Cannes Festival. One more rule of the Dogma type "Do as I say, not as I do", from clever and often brilliant Lars Von Trier. With "Red Road", where a woman is out to avenge the death of her daughter and husband who were run over, the Trier rule is the following: three different scripts are written as from the idea of the same characters but in different situations. The first was this film "Red Road" where the main character takes justice into her own hands and has resort to the fascinating police job of spying on people`s lives through city security cameras. Clever Lars Von Trier has devised a new hallmark and will oblige us to follow along with the next two films in this new series. And why ever not?
A second parallel jury, with Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Brazilian film critic Luis Carlos Merten, awarded the `Camera d`Or" for Best New Director to Rumanian Cornelius Porumboiu for "A Fost Sal n-a Fost/ 12:08 East of Bucharest" - a dramatic comedy on the fall of the dictatorship and the improbable participation of the inhabitants of a small out-lying city at the time the regime was overthrown. There was much expectation that this prize would be awarded to the Mexican film "El Violín" by Francisco Vargas. But the one to win a prize for the film was veteran Don Angel Tavira, an actor who plays an old, touching violinist in the film, the father of a member of the Resistance in the region of Chiapas. The film won a parallel prize in the `Un Certain Regard` selection, where Chinese "Luxury Car", by Wang Chão won the grand prize.
Other parallel award-winners included Turkish "Iklimler/ Climates",
by Niri Bilge Ceylan and Paraguayan "Hamaca Paraguaya", by Paz Encina,
awarded Prizes from the Critics; and in prizes awarded in the Critic`s Week
section, short films "Kristall", by Germand Christoph Girardet and
Mathias Muller, and "Alguma Coisa Assim/ Something Like That", by
Esmir Filho, ranked as outstanding.
For further information:
www.festival-cannes.org
