Cannes: Will Asia strike gold again?

Hours away from Sunday night’s awards ceremony to be hosted by French actress Audrey Tautou, the 66th Cannes Film Festival remains a wide open race. At least half a dozen entries (from a field of 20) are in with a fair chance of winning the Palme d’Or, one of the most coveted cinema prizes in the world.

Cambodian director Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture has already won the best film prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. The Palestinian film, Omar, directed by Hany Abu-Assad, has won the jury prize in the section.   
So, could this, like 2010, be another Asian year? Asghar Farhadi’s Le Passe (The Past), a superbly acted and expertly calibrated family drama set in France, is among the Competition films that impressed this year. If the Steven Spielberg-headed jury votes for it, Farhadi will become only the seventh Asian director to win the festival’s top prize.

In 2010, Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the Palme d’Or, while Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo’s Hahaha took home the best film award in the Un Certain Regard sidebar.

Exactly 20 years ago, in 1993, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine had become the first-ever Chinese film to win the Cannes Film Festival competition. Four years later, two films from Asia – Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (Iran) and Shohei Imamura’s The Eel (Japan) – were joint winners of the Palme d’Or.

In 1946, in the inaugural edition of the Cannes Film Festival, India’s Chetan Anand, with Neecha Nagar, was one of 11 Grand Prix winners. In the years since, two Japanese directors, Teinosuke Kinugasa (Gate of Hell, 1954) and Akira Kurosawa (Kagemusha, 1980), have won the best film award in Cannes.

Imamura is the only Asian director to have won the Cannes top prize on two occasions. In 1983, his timeless The Ballad of Narayama bagged the Palme d’Or. It was the year when Mrinal Sen’s Kharij won the Special Jury Prize.  

This has been a particularly strong year in Cannes for cinema from Asia, both in the main Competition and in Un Certain Regard. Besides Farhadi, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, with Like Father, Like Son, a simple but profoundly touching tale of flawed parenting and eventual redemption in contemporary Tokyo, is also being tipped for the Palme d’Or.

Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, a four-segment story that provides a daring, often shockingly violent, view of today’s China, is yet another entry from Asia that has found its way to the top of the list of many critics here.

The other leading Palme d’Or contenders are La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty) by Italy’s Paolo Sorrentino, Blue if the Warmest Colour by French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche and the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis.

Kechiche’s provocative film, a three-hour lesbian-themed exploration of teen angst, has an outside chance of tipping the jury scales in its favour. If it were to win, it would mark a huge triumph for Arab cinema, which has only one Palme d’Or in its kitty thus far. Back in 1975, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronicle of the Years of Fire was the Palme d’Or winner.

Another African film in Competition this year is French-Chadian director Mahamet-Saleh Haroun’s Grigris. In 2010, Haroun’s The Screaming Man had won the Cannes jury prize, but Grigris unlikely to end up among the prizes.     

In Un Certain Regard, as many as seven of the 17 films were from Asia, and two of won the nod of the jury led by Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg. If Farhadi, Kore-eda or Zhangke manage to make a similar impression on Spielberg’s jury of nine, it would be another rare double for Asia.

The seven Asian titles in Un Certain Regard were Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (Cambodia), Flora Lau’s Bends (hong Kong), Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar (Palestine), Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn (Iran), Hineer Saleem’s My Sweet Pepper Land (Iraq), Adolfo Alix Jr.’s Death March (the Philippines) and Lav Diaz’s Norte, The End of History (also from the Philippines).

A repeat of 2010 could well be on the cards. Watch this space.