CANNES, France – The 70th anniversary Cannes Film Festival ends Sunday when the world’s leading movie showcase rolls out its prestigious prizes, including the iconic Palme d’Or for best picture.
CANNES, France – The 70th anniversary Cannes Film Festival ends Sunday when the world’s leading movie showcase rolls out its prestigious prizes, including the iconic Palme d’Or for best picture.
A nine-member jury headed by Academy Award-winning Spanish director Pablo Almodovar has to select from the 19 films comprising this year’s main competition when handing out the festival’s awards at a gala event in the French resort town.
Leading contenders for this year’s Palme d’Or include Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Loveless” about the self-absorption and greed of his nation’s middle class as well as French director and AIDS activist Robin Campillo’s account of the 1980’s AIDS crisis in “BPM (Beats per Minute) “.
But the festival’s jury are notoriously difficult to predict with Ukrainian-based Sergei Loznitsa’s brutal portrayal of modern Russia in “A Gentle Creature” and U. S. director Sofia Coppola’s American civil war melodrama “The Beguiled” also winning praise among festivalgoers.
The jury, which included U. S. actors Will Smith and Jessica Chastain, also has to award the festival prizes for best director, best actor and actress.
The competition included several stand-out performances such as Hollywood-based British star Robert Pattinson as a bank robber on the run from dangerous criminals in Benny and Josh Safdie’s “Good Time.”
German actress and Hollywood star Diane Kruger also won plaudits for her role as a German woman seeking revenge for the deaths of her Kurdish husband and their son in a neo-Nazi-inspired bomb attack in German-born director Fatih Akin’s “Aus dem Nichts” (“In the Fade”) .
