The 68th Cannes Film Festival was brought to a surprising close on Sunday with Jacques Audiard’s Sri Lankan-refugee drama taking the festival’s coveted top honour, the Palme d’Or.
The choice of Dheepan, by a jury led by filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, left some critics scratching their heads. While French director Audiard has drawn widespread acclaim for films such as A Prophet and Rust and Bone, some critics were disappointed by the thriller-style climax of his latest.
Dheepan is about three Sri Lankans who pretend to be a family so they can flee their war-torn country and settle in a violent area on the outskirts of Paris.
“This isn’t a jury of film critics,” said Joel Coen after the awards ceremony, alongside fellow jurors including Guillermo del Toro and Jake Gyllenhaal. “This is a jury of artists who are looking at the work.”
Ethan Coen added: “We all thought it was a very beautiful movie. Everyone had some high level of excitement and enthusiasm for it.”
While accepting the award, Audiard was joined by the stars of the film, Kalieaswari Srinivasan and Antonythasan Jesuthasan, who was a Tamil Tiger child-soldier before finding political asylum in France.
The runner-up prize, the Grand Prix, went to Son of Saul, a Holocaust drama by first-time Hungarian director László Nemes.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien, the 68-year-old Taiwanese filmmaker, won Best Director for his first feature in eight years, The Assassin, a lush martial-arts drama. The Best Actress prize was shared, but not the way some expected. It was given to Rooney Mara, who co-stars with Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes's 1950s romantic drama Carol, and Emmanuelle Bercot, the French star of the drama My King. It had been thought that any split award would go to Mara and Blanchett.
The Best Actor award went to Vincent Lindon, the veteran French star of Stéphane Brizé's The Measure of a Man, in which he plays a man struggling to make a living after a long period of unemployment.
The Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos took the Jury Prize for The Lobster, his first English-language film. It is a deadpan dystopian comedy starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, about a near-future where people are given a limited time to find a mate or else they are turned into the animal of their choice.
Chronic, an understated drama starring Tim Roth as a home-care nurse for the terminally ill, took Best Screenplay for Mexican writer-director Michel Franco.
The Camera d'Or, Cannes award for best first feature film, went to La Tierra Y la Sombra. César Augusto Acevedo's debut, which played in the Critics' Week section, is about a farmer returning home to tend to his gravely ill son.
An honorary Palme d’Or was also given to French filmmaker Agnès Varda. She is the first woman to receive one and only the fourth director after Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Bernardo Bertolucci.
