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SHOPLIFTERS STEALS THE SHOW TO WIN PALME D’OR
The Cannes jury finds it ‘bloody hard’ to decide on a winner... then the top prize goes to Hirokazu Koreeda
Defying all speculation on whether the top prize at the 71st Cannes Film Festival might go to a female director this year — there were three strong contenders — the Palme d’Or was awarded to Hirokazu Koreeda on the concluding day.
The Japanese director won the award, one of the most prestigious in the world, for his film Shoplifters, a critically acclaimed family drama with unguessable plot twists.
The expectation that a female director might be awarded this year arose from the fact that conversations around #MeToo (the campaign against sexual assault) and #TimesUp (the campaign for gender equality and against all kinds of bias against women) had been carried into this fest.
Italian actor Asia Argento said, in a speech ahead of the prize-giving ceremony at Cannes, that “even tonight, sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women”. Argento is among those who’ve accused Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She said that Weinstein raped her during the Cannes festival in 1997, when she was 21.
After the ceremony, actor Cate Blanchett, who headed the jury of five women and four men, said, “Women and men alike on the jury would love to see more female directorial voices represented,” adding that it had been “bloody hard” to select a winner. “But in the end,” she added, “I think we were completely bowled over by how intermeshed the performances were with the directorial vision” of Shoplifters. The runner-up prize, the Grand Prix, went to American filmmaker Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, a satire based on the true story of a black police officer who infiltrated the infamous white supremacist organisation, Ku Klux Klan, in the 1970s.
Blanchett said that the film’s ending, with footage of the farright rally in Charlottesville, US, last August and President Donald Trump blaming “both sides” for the deadly violence, “blew us out of the cinema”.
Lebanon’s Nadine Labaki won the Jury Prize — that’s the bronze medal — for her realist drama Capharnaum, about childhood in Beirut slums.
And 50 years after he helped get the Cannes fest cancelled in 1968, in solidarity with workerstudent protests, 87-year-old Jean-Luc Godard received a Special Palme d’Or for his collage of sounds and images, The Image Book.