Koreeda’s ‘Shoplifters’ steals the show at Cannes
CANNES, France: Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda won the Palme d’Or at Cannes yesterday for Shoplifters, a critically acclaimed family drama with unguessable plot twists.
The award, to a director who has won prizes at the festival before, defied speculation that the Palme might go to a female director.
Italian actress Asia Argento, who has accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, said in a speech before the prizegiving there were abusers in the audience who had yet to be outed.
Argento said Weinstein raped her during the Cannes festival in 1997 when she was 21.
‘‘This festival was his hunting ground,’’ she said.
Weinstein has denied allegations of nonconsensual sex, and a lawyer representing him said Argento’s claims were false.
‘‘Even tonight, sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women,’’ Argento told the audience.
‘‘You know who you are, but, most importantly, we know who you are, and we are not going to allow you to get away with it any longer.’’
Weinstein’s attorney in Italy, Filomena Cusano, said the allegations by Argento were completely false, and that Argento and Weinstein had had a consen sual relationship.
After the ceremony, 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,’’ and it had been ‘‘bloody hard’’ to select a winner.
‘‘But in the end I think we were completely bowled over by how intermeshed the performances were with the directorial vision,’’ she said of Shoplifters.
The runnerup prize, the Grand Prix, went to Spike Lee’s satire BlacKkKlansman, based on the true story of a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.
Blanchett said the film’s ending, with footage of the farright rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last August and President Donald Trump blaming ‘‘both sides’’ for the deadly violence, ‘‘blew us out of the cinema’’.
A female director, Nadine Labaki from Lebanon, won the Jury Prize — effectively the bronze medal — for
Capharnaum, a realist drama about childhood neglect in the slums of Beirut.
Fifty years after he helped get the Cannes festival cancelled in 1968, in solidarity with workerstudent protests, JeanLuc Godard (87) received a Special Palme d’Or for his collage of sounds and images The Image Book.
Poland’s Pawel Pawlikowski won best director for Cold War
and Lukas Dhont, who directed
Girl a Belgian drama about a transgender teen’s quest to become a ballerina, won the Camera d’Or for best directorial debut. — Reuters