Cannes 2008 Winners
As we already wrote “Entre les Murs” (”The Class“) directed by Laurent Cantet won the Golden Palm (Palme d’Or) at 2008 Cannes Film festival.Other winners included Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, two-time Palme d’Or recipients, who took the screenplay award for “The Silence of Lorna.”
Sandra Corveloni, who played a working-class mother in São Paulo in Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’s “Linha de Passe,” won the best actress award.
Benicio Del Toro, who played the title in Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” won the prize for best actor.
The directing award went to Nuri Bilge Ceylan for “Three Monkeys,” a film about a disintegrating Turkish family.
Both the jury prize and the grand prix went to Italian films:
-the jury prize to “Il Divo,” Paolo Sorrentino’s highly stylized portrait of former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti
-and the grand prix to Matteo Garrone’s “Gomorrah,” a brutally realistic examination of organized crime in Naples.
The Caméra d’Or for best first feature went to Steve McQueen’s “Hunger,” (Un Certain Regard) which unsparingly depicts the protests of imprisoned IRA militants in the 1980s.
The jury conferred two special prizes for Catherine Deneuve for ”Un Conte De Noel” and Clint Eastwood for ”The Exchange.”
In Competition
Un Certain Regard Prize
”Tulpan” by Sergey Dvortsevoy
Jury Prize
“Tokyo Sonata” by Kurosawa Kiyoshi
Heart Throb Jury Prize
”Wolke 9” by Andreas Drese
The Knockout of Un Certain Regard
”Tyson” by James Toback
Prize of Hope
”Johnny Mad Dog” by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire
Un Certain Regard
American distributors had, by the end of the festival, bought some of the most interesting films in and out of competition.
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Palme d’Or - Laurent Cantet’s ‘Entres Les Murs’ / ‘The Class’
“Entre les Murs” (”The Class“), based on a best-selling autobiographical novel by François Begaudeau, who plays the main character is brought alive by the performances of the non-professional actors playing the students. The film follows a year in the life of a French schoolteacher working in a tough multi-cultural section of Paris.
Sean Penn, the president of the jury, said that the award for “The Class” was one of two unanimous verdicts. The other was the prize for best actor, given to Benicio Del Toro, who played the title in Steven Soderbergh’s “Che.”
Directed and co-written by Laurent Cantet (Human Resources’, Time Out), the film is set in a school in the Parisian suburbs; indeed, with the exception of a handful of brief scenes shot in the staff room, the corridors, and the playground, the entire movie is set in one classroom, where François (François Begaudau), a French teacher of some four years standing, attempts to instill some sort of discipline and enthusiasm for learning into a motley, multicultural group of 13- and 14-year-olds. Read the rest of this entry
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