The Child, a Belgian drama about a petty thief who sells his baby son, won the Cannes film festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or on Saturday at a red-carpet ceremony.
The movie, by director brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, triumphed over a field of 20 other pictures by a veteran pack of American, European and Asian filmmakers.
The brothers dedicated the prize to Florence Aubenas and Hussein Hanoun, a French journalist and her Iraqi interpreter who have been held hostage in Iraq since January.
”Maybe it [the message] will get through and will show the kidnappers we are just as obstinate as they are” in hoping for the captives’ release, Jean-Pierre told reporters after leaving the stage with the top prize.
The Cannes jury, headed by Sarajevo-born director Emir Kusterica, awarded its runner-up prize, the Grand Prix, to Broken Flowers, a melancholic road movie starring Bill Murray as a man looking for a son he is told he fathered decades earlier.
”I would really like to accept this on behalf of all filmmakers who follow their hearts,” said its director, Jim Jarmusch, praising all this year’s entrants.
Tommy Lee Jones, the star of Hollywood blockbusters The Fugitive and Men in Black, picked up the best-acting award for the leading role in his film directing debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a tough-as-nails tale about death and redemption in the border area between Texas and Mexico.
The film also earned the best-screenplay honour for the story written by Guillermo Arriaga, who penned 21 Grams.
The best-actress award went to Israeli entertainer Hanna Laslo, who, in the Israeli movie Free Zone by Amos Gitai, plays a woman travelling to Jordan looking for money she is owed.
She dedicated the honour to her mother, an Auschwitz survivor.
Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai received the jury’s prize for his film Shanghai Dreams.
Oscar winners Morgan Freeman and Hilary Swank lent Hollywood glamour to the Cannes awards ceremony, handing the Palme d’Or — a golden frond — to the Dardenne brothers in front of an audience of VIPs and celebrities.
Among those attending were directors Hiner Saleem of Iraq and Robert Rodriguez of the United States, whose films, Kilometre Zero and Sin City, failed to pick up awards.
Ralph Fiennes and Penelope Cruz, the stars of the closing film Chromophobia, screened out of competition after the awards ceremony, were also present, as was French actor Lambert Wilson.
New thread of paternity
This year’s line-up of films at Cannes homed in on a number of themes.
Sex, violence and death — common elements to movies generally and sometimes taken to extreme lengths at Cannes — all featured strongly, sometimes excessively.
But it was paternity that ran a new thread through a diverse range of films.
In The Child, the father-son plot serves to expose European poverty and urge redemptive behaviour from the no-hoper main character.
Its victory was the second Cannes triumph for the Dardennes, who won the Palme d’Or in 1999 for their film Rosetta.
It also surprised many critics who had been tipping Hidden, a subtle French film about Western bias against Arabs, as the leading movie in the race. That picture, by Austrian director Michael Haneke, picked up only a stage-direction award.
Paternity also featured in Broken Flowers and a number of other movies that lost out for the top prize, including Don’t Come Knockin’ by Wim Wenders and Shanghai Dreams.
The accolades and post-mortems that surrounded Saturday’s trophies were a far cry from the furore that broke loose last year when Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme.
That victory for the documentary bashing US President George Bush was seen by some critics as a political gesture by a jury dominated by Americans.
In a very deliberate decision by Cannes’s organisers, none of this year’s contenders came close to matching the incendiary nature of Moore’s documentary.
The only competition movie that touched on the topical subject of Iraq was Bashing, a movie about a Japanese woman facing ostracism in her home country after being freed from a hostage ordeal in the Middle East. It proved to be one of the biggest critical disappointments. — Sapa-AFP