CANNES 2007 Winners

IFC used to air the Cannes Awards ceremony every year, hosted by Roger Ebert and Annette Insdorf (who translated). I looked forward to it each year, but two years ago, they cancelled it. So, I have to stick to wire reports for the winners.

This year, the Palme D'or went to 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS, a Romanian film about a woman getting an illegal abortion. It is said to be a popular choice.

Julian Schnabel won Best Director for THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, the true story of a writer who is paralyzed. One confusing thing, haven't there been at least two films about this before? I saw a documentary several years ago, and I think there was also another film as well.

Gus Van Sant was given a special award for his new film, PARANOID PARK about skateboarders. The one comment I heard about the film, they paraphrased Matthew McConaughey in DAZED AND CONFUSED "He may get older, but his characters remain the same age."

Quoting from the L.A. Times.

This edition of Cannes was also a good one for Asian filmmakers. Japanese director Naomi Kawase won the Grand Prize for "The Mourning Forest," and, in a considerably more popular award, Korean performer Jeon Do-yeon took the best actress prize for her tour de force starring role as a widow who faces startling difficulties in making a life for herself in "Secret Sunshine." The best actor prize went to Konstantin Lavronenko of "The Banishment," the overly long new film by Russia's Andrey Zvyagintsev, who also made the Lavronenko-starring "The Return."

Turkish director Fatih Akin, who often works in Germany and whose "Head-On" won the Golden Bear in Berlin a few years back, took the best screenplay prize for his "The Edge of Heaven," a thoughtful examination of the pain of being caught between cultures and generations.

The Jury Prize was split between very different films. Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light" is a formal, severe film about adultery set in a Mennonite community in Mexico, while Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's "Persepolis" is an antic animated feature taken from Satrapi's graphic novels. Also from the Middle East was the winner of the Camera d'Or for best first feature, "Meduzot," co-directed by popular Israeli author Etgar Keret, who said he was wearing his first suit since his bar mitzvah, and Shira Geffen.