Kechiche wins Palme d'Or, Asia scores big

A new world order in the sphere of auteur-driven cinema appeared to emerge on Sunday as the jury of the 66th Cannes Film Festival announced the prize winners.

With the exception of the Coen Brothers, all the winners of the evening were first-time Cannes awardees.       

Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche’s sexually graphic three-hour lesbian epic, Blue is the Warmest Colour, won the Palme d’Or.

Tunis-born Kechiche is the first Arab filmmaker to win the festival’s top prize since 1975, the year Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina won the Palme d’Or for Chronicle of the Years of Fire.

In an unprecedented move, the jury headed by Steven Spielberg decided to award Golden Palms not just to Kechiche but also to the two stars of the film – Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux.  

The Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, a celebration of the 1960s folk music scene in New York, had to settle for the Grand Prix, the festival’s second-ranked award.

The only other American film on the awards roster was Alexander Payne’s black-and-white road movie Nebraska, for which thespian Bruce Dern, playing an ageing father and husband, won the best actor prize. 

The main Competition awards also recognized two well-received Asian films.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son, a drama about two Japanese couples who discover that their six-year-old boys were swapped at birth, won the Jury Prize.

Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, a four-segment tale of down-and-out characters driven to acts of violence in contemporary China, won the best screenplay award.

Argentine-born French actress Berenice Bejo, last seen in Cannes in husband Michel Hazanivicius’2011 film The Artist, was adjudged best actress for her performance in Asghar Farhadi’s Le Passe (The Past).

The film has her in the role of a French woman grappling with the repercussions of a long-pending divorce from her Iranian husband.
The best director prize went to Mexico’s Amat Escalante for Heli, an unrelentingly bleak take on a family caught up in violence unleashed by a drug cartel.

In another significant triumph for Asian cinema, the Camera d’Or for the best first film in the festival went to Singaporean director Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo, which was screened in Directors’ Fortnight.

Ilo Ilo, set in late 1990s recession-hit Singapore, is the story of a Filipina maid’s growing bond with a troubled boy of the middle class family that she works for. It is the first-ever Singaporean film to win a major award in Cannes.

On Saturday, Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture, a 95-minute documentary on Cambodia’s dreaded Khmer Rouge era, won the Un Certain Regard Prize.

In the sidebar, Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar, a searing story of love, friendship, betrayal and violence set in strife-torn Palestine, was given the Jury Prize.