Who will be the successor to Ruben Östlund’s “Ohne Filter”? After twelve days full of glitter and stars, the 76th Cannes Film Festival ends on Saturday evening with the awarding of the Palme d’Or to one of the 21 films in a competition that was very open to the end.
The Swedish director, who won his second Palme last year, chairs the jury, which went into seclusion to discuss and award the awards.
Östlund, who promised “a very democratic approach to the presidency” in an interview with AFP, has to decide in the presence of the four women and four men on his jury, including director Julia Ducournau (“Titanium”, Golden Palm 2021). Actress Brie Larson, known as the superheroine Captain Marvel, the Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi or the actor Denis Ménochet.
“I love listening to what everyone has to say about the different films. (…) I have no intention of being an authority figure in any way,” he promised.
At the end of the competition, the excitement is complete.
With a few favourites: Finn Aki Kaurismäki, a regular at the festival and one of Ruben Östlund’s favorite directors, received a rave reviews for the ultra-melancholic ‘The Dead Leaves’, a romance with baudelairy accents between two lonely souls, in a toiling and rainy day Finland.
The award list will take a more political turn when the jury decides to choose British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer and his “Zone of Interest”: This highly controlled film evokes the chilling “banality of evil” by examining everyday life in clinical and terrifying ways Weise describes the very easy-going family of the commandant of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
His compatriot Ken Loach, 86, could be inducted into the Hall of Fame in his lifetime by becoming the first director to win a third Golden Award after The Wind Rises (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016). palm wins.
He was the last to climb the steps for The Old Oak on Friday night, on the UK’s reception of Syrian refugees.
As far as the interpreter award is concerned, the German Sandra Hüller, who was presented to the international public in Cannes with “Toni Erdmann” (2016), is a serious contender: she shines in two films and plays the wife of the Nazi commander in “Zone of”. Interest” and a widow accused of killing her husband in “Anatomy of a fall”.
This last film, a 2h30 drama with a very elaborate structure, is among those that the international critics liked the most.
Should it win the Palme d’Or, its author Justin Triet would be only the third director in the festival’s history to receive an award, following Jane Campion (‘The Piano Lesson’, 1993) and Julia Ducournau.
Beyond the awards ceremony, the closing ceremony, led by Chiara Mastroianni and broadcast on France Télévisions and Brut from 8:30 p.m., marks the conclusion of a 76th edition led for the first time by Iris Knobloch, ex-Warner.
It was marked by controversy over the return of Johnny Depp after his libel trials over allegations of domestic violence, a strong presence of cinema from the African continent and the return of Hollywood legends to the Croisette.
Among those making the journey: Martin Scorsese, who along with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert de Niro introduced his latest film Killers of the Flower Moon, Harrison Ford, who at the age of 80 climbed the steps for the final Indiana Jones” and said goodbye to the character of the archaeologist with hat and whip or to actress Jane Fonda and director Quentin Tarantino, who came to talk about cinema and their careers.
A number of awards have already been presented, including the Un Certain Regard award for Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex and the Queer Palm, an alternative award for best LGBT film, for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster , also an official competition.
On Saturday morning, the Best Documentary Award, the Golden Eye, was presented to two ex-aequo directors: Kadib Abyad (“The Mother of All Lies”) and Kaouther Ben Hania, also in the running for the Palme d’Or with “Les filles d ‘Olfa’, a film about a Tunisian family faced with the radicalization of two of their daughters.