French director Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva has scooped the top Ami Paris Grand Prize in the competition of Cannes parallel section Critics’ Week.
The first film follows a group of French high-school students who travel to Naples on a school trip to discover the ruins of Pompeii and the bodies petrified by Vesuvius. Emotions and desires spill out against the backdrop of the ancient site and its beauty.
This year’s jury was presided over by Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, who was joined by Quebecois actor Théodore Pellerin, singer-songwriter Oklou, Ghanaian-British producer Ama Ampadu, and journalist and director of the Bangkok World Film Festival Donsaron Kovitvanitcha.
Phuong Mai Nguyen’s In Waves, an animated feature adaptation of L.A. illustrator AJ Dungo’s eponymous cult 2019 graphic novel set in California, will open the 65th edition of Cannes Critics’ Week.
In other prizes, actress and director Aina Clotet won the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award. The Spanish actress’s debut feature Viva is a bittersweet comedy set in Catalonia, in which she stars as a woman rethinking her personal and professional life as she recovers from breast cancer during an extreme heat wave
In collateral prizes, Zou Jiung’s A Girl Unknown won the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution, which will support the French release of the film by Pyramide Distribution.
The film explores the implications of the abandonment of thousands of newborn baby girls in China from the 1980s to 2,000 as a result of the country’s one-child policy, through the tale of a girl grows up from the age of 6 to 18 across three families, each giving her a new name and a different life.
The SACD Award for best screenplay went to director Blerta Basholli and Nicole Borgeat who co-wrote the former’s drama Dua, a coming-of-age tale set in the late 1990s on the cusp of the Kosovo War.
The Sony Discovery Prize For Short Film went to Skinny Boots by Romain F. Dubois, and the Canal+ Award For Short Film to “Vaterland” or A Bule Named Yanto.
Focused on first and second features and emerging talent, Critics’ Week showcased 11 features, selected from 1050 feature-length submissions, and ten short works this year. It opened with Phuong Mai Nguyen’s In Waves, and officially closed this evening with Adieu Monde Cruel.
