Globe and Mail Update Published on Sunday, May. 23, 2010 3:51PM EDT Last updated on Monday, May. 24, 2010 11:49AM EDT
Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Sunday took the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival with a surreal and hypnotic meditation on reincarnation set in the jungle.
Spanish actor Javier Bardem and Italy’s Elio Germano shared the best actor award and France’s Juliette Binoche won the best actress prize for her role as an unhappy art dealer in Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s film Certified Copy.
The Apichatpong’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives sees a lost son return as a monkey ghost, a disfigured princess have sex with a catfish and a dead wife return to guide her husband into the afterlife. Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann’s distribution company, filmswelike, will reap some of the glory of the win as it is the film’s distributor.
Apichatpong, 39, said after receiving the award from festival jury president Tim Burton that he wanted to thank “the spirits in Thailand that surrounded us” while making the film.
The most significant Canadian win came from director Xavier Dolan, 21, who won the Regards Jeunes prize on Saturday afternoon for Heartbeats. The film screened in the Un Certain Regard sidebar of this year’s Official Selection.
It is the second year in a row that Dolan has won the same prize. At last year’s festival, he took the Regards Jeunes, along with two other prizes for his Directors’ Fortnight entry, J’ai Tué Ma Mère (I Killed My Mother). The prize is selected by a jury of seven young cinephiles for a director’s first or second film.
In other prizes that were handed out before Sunday night’s ceremony, Korean director Hang Song-soo’s film, Ha Ha Ha, took the Un Certain Regard Prize.
The jury, led by Belgian director Claire Denis, also gave jury prizes to Peruvian brother directors, Daniel and Diego Vega, for October, a drama about a loan shark who finds himself caring for an infant. In addition, the jury gave a performance prize to three actresses: Adela Sanchez, Eva Bianco and Victoria Raposo, who starrred in from Ivan Fund and Santiago Loza’s Los Labios (Lips) about women welfare workers in Argentina.
Director Mathieu Amalric’s On Tour, starring Amalric as a French manager of an American burlesque troupe, took the FIPRESCI prize, awarded by the International Federation of the Cinematographic Press.
The Ecumenical Prize for promoting religious understanding went to French director Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men, the true-life story of a group of Catholic monks working in a mountain village in Algiers the mid-nineties, who were confronted by Islamist militants.
With files from Liam Lacey
http://www.businessandleadership.com/life/news/article/22822/life/thai-film-wins-palme-dor-at-cannes
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