The Jane Campion-headed jury has made its decision. Although Nuri Bilge Ceylan has plenty of awards from past Cannes Film Festivals (Grand Prix for Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Distant; Best Director Prize for Three Monkeys (2008)), he won his first Palme d’Or for Winter Sleep.
Clocking in at 196 minutes—nearly 20 minutes longer than last year’s Palme d’Or winner Blue is the Warmest Color—the film concerns a small, isolated hotel in Anatolia managed by Aydin, who lives with his bitter and difficult wife and his recently divorced sister. As the official synopsis from Cannes describes, a harsh winter turns the hotel “into a shelter” and “an inescapable place that fuels their animosities.” In his acceptance speech, Ceylan implicitly paid tribute to all the protesters who lost their lives last year during the Gezi Park protests. Winter Sleep is only the second film from Turkey to win the Palme d’Or after 1982’s The Way by Yilmaz Guney and Serif Goren.
With critical praise already behind it, Foxcatcher made head start into awards season as Bennett Miller collected the Best Director prize. Though Steve Carrell has been widely acclaimed for his performance as John E. du Pont in the film, Timothy Spall won the Best Actor award for his performance as the renowned British painter J.M.W. Turner in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner. Julianne Moore, who played a once famous Hollywood actress who’s past her glory days in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, won the Best Actress Prize. Moore’s win was a bit of a surprise given the high expectations for Marion Cotillard to take the award for her performance in the Dardennes brothers’ Two Days, One Night. This year marks the first time the Dardennes brothers left empty-handed from Cannes.
The Grand Prix (a.k.a. second place) went to Alice Rohrwacher’s Le Meraviglie (The Wonders), which tells the story of a small beekeeping family in rural Italy that struggles to maintain its traditional lifestyle upon the arrival of a strange delinquent boy and a new TV competition in the local community.
Xavier Dolan’s Mommy and Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu Au Langage shared the Jury Prize (incidentally Dolan and Godard were the oldest and youngest filmmakers, respectively, with competition films), while Andrey Zvyaginstev’s and Oleg Negin’s Leviathan, an adaptation of the story of Jobs from the Bible set in modern Russia, received the Best Screenplay Award.
The full list of winners is below:
FEATURE FILMS
Palme d’or: Winter Sleep by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Grand Prix: Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) by Alice Rohrwacher
Best Director Award: Bennett Miller for Foxcatcher
Jury Prize ex-aequo: Mommy by Xavier Dolan, Adieu Au Langage (Goodbye to Language) by Jean-Luc Godard
Best Screenplay Award: Andrey Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin for Leviathan
Best Actress Award: Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars by David Cronenberg
Best Actor Award: Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner by Mike Leigh
SHORT FILMS
Palme d’or: Leidi by Simón Mesa Soto
Special Mention – Ex-aequo: Aïssa by Clément Trehin-Lalanne, Ja Vi Elsker (Yes We Love) by Hallvar Witzø
UN CERTAIN REGARD
Un Certain Regard Prize: Fehér Isten by Kornél Mundruczó
Jury Prize: Turist by Ruben Östlund
Un Certain Regard Special Prize: The Salt of the Earth by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado
Ensemble Prize: Party Girl by Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger and Samuel Theis
Best Actor Award: David Gulpilil in Charlie’s Country by Rolf de Heer
CAMÉRA D’OR
Party Girl by Marie AMACHOUKELI, Claire BURGER, Samuel THEIS
CINÉFONDATION
First Prize: Skunk by Annie Silverstein, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Second Prize: Oh Lucy! by Atsuko Hirayanagi, NYU Tisch School of the Arts Asia, Singapore
Joint Third Prize: Lievito Madre by Fulvio Risuleo, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Italy; The Bigger Picture by Daisy Jacobs, National Film and Television School, United Kingdom
The Jury of the CST has awarded the VULCAN AWARD OF THE TECHNICAL ARTIST to: Dick Pope, director of photography, for bringing to light the works of Turner in the movie Mr. Turner by Mike Leigh
Leave a Comment