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And the award goes to...
Director Ken Loach, winner of the Palme D'Or, for his film, The Wind that Shakes the Barley
The otherwise mellow festival livened up to spirited round of awards
Uma Da Cunha, From Cannes
Cannes has been at its most mellow mood in years. Without complaint, dissatisfaction or inertia, all is nice and quiet on the Cannes front. The films are not exceptional, but okay. There is variety and content, but not enough to make one debate and question and lose control.
Does one miss the difference? Do the Cannes viewers want the heady talk, the quarrels on different opinions, and the edgy side of who should win and may not? For my part, I would say, yes.
There was a year when I began talking to a couple, both journalists. We quickly got on to the film that had gripped Cannes viewers and it got them into a bid of "for" or "against". The two got agitated at their differing opinions and then decided to split for the evening, heat balloons emanating from their respective heads. Now, that's a festival for you.
However, the awards ceremony made up for all the earlier laid-back days. From the word go, the spirit on stage was lively, spirited, and open-hearted. At every stage, each award winner expressed a sense of bonhomie and goodwill for cinema as a collaborative art. Jury president Wong Kar Wai in his opening statements struck a note of self-assured, fresh insights from his jury members, which he said would be evident in the awards themselves. He was absolutely right.
The glamour people from the film world, who introduced each award was taken over by the generosity of the winners. The unassuming young Andrea Arnold was first on stage, winning the Jury Prize for her first film Red Road, and she said what was echoed all evening — that a film's success belonged to all those who worked on it.
What brought the house down with true appreciation was when the best actress award was given to Pedro Almodovar's Volver, a film that celebrates the world of women. The award went to all the five great women actors in the film. They loved being on stage together, expressing a strong and unassuming solidarity for each other and for their director.
Then came the best actor award, which again went to a band of young men acting in the stirring war film Indegenes, directed by Rachid Bouchareb. The film, set in 1943, is about 'native' Algerian men recruited in hoards to help the French army fight the German invaders. One among the young three Algerian actors went running all over the stage, kissing the hand of certain jury members. The entire lot then burst into a fervent patriotic song and the audience clapped to its rhythm.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel won the award for Best Script. The director in his speech dedicated this prize to his two small children, who he said traveled as gypsies with him wherever he went and helped him to blend with the culture of each place they were in. Bruno Dumont spoke in French and seemed very contained. He won yet another Cannes award for his film Flandres (the only award that did not have popular support). Earlier, Dumont won the Palme D'Or in 1999 for his film Humanity.
Finally, it was wonderful to hear from the Jury President that the winner of the top award, the Palme D'Or, was Ken Loach's film, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, on the Irish nationalist movement of the 1920s. In his acceptance speech, the soft-spoken Loach said that he appreciated the support the award meant for fighting oppression and imperialism. His concluding remark was "If you tell the truth about the past, perhaps it may lead to the truth about the present".
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