Samir Farid wraps up ten days of film-watching at Cannes, the festival of film festivals and benchmark of what to watch for the rest of the year The American actor, producer and political activist Sean Penn, head of the Jury at this year's Cannes Film Festival (14-25 May), made a statement at the beginning of the festival to the effect that he would like to see filmmakers who show themselves to be aware of the times in which we live being rewarded for this awareness. Last Sunday the festival's star-studded awards ceremony saw the fulfillment of Penn's wish. Two overtly political Italian films -- Gomorrah and Il Divo -- received the Grand Prix and the Jury Award respectively, while the top two acting awards went to Benicio del Toro for his role as the legendary Argentinean revolutionary Che Guevara in the American film Che, and to Sandra Corveloni for her role in the Brazilian film Linha de Passe (Line of Passage), which depicts a poor mother of four youngsters trying to pursue impossible dreams in the slums of Sao Paulo. Corveloni's performance in Linha de Passe, directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, was indeed powerful, though some critics felt that Angelina Jolie in the American film Changeling deserved the prize. As for Benicio del Toro in the role of Che Guevara, he more than deserved his prize, since he gave what must have been one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema, though the film itself was not a great one. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, Che was too long at four hours 28 minutes, and while it could be argued that it is one of the better commercial films made on the life of Guevara, following his becoming a cult hero after his tragic death at the hands of the CIA in 1967, it is still an average film saved by a great actor. As for the two Italian films which reaped the Grand Prix and the Jury Prize, both films dealt with the relationship between the Mafia and Italy's political leadership. While Il Divo (The Star), directed by Paolo Sorrentino, is a political satire focusing on Italy's late prime minister Giulio Andreotti, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah is a seering investigation of the machinations of the Mafia. These two awards were a special tribute to Italian cinema, which emerged victorious out of Cannes this year: there were only two Italian films in the main competition and both received prestigious awards from among the seven on offer at the festival. Naturally, though, it is the festival's top award, the Palme d'Or, that reveals more than any other award which way the wind is blowing. And this year it was blowing in a French direction, something which has not happened for 21 years and since the late French director Maurice Pialat's Sous le soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan) received the Palme d'Or in 1987. Thus, when Robert de Niro was called onto the stage of the Grand Théâtre Lumière to award the Palme d'Or to the best film of the 22 in the official competition and it transpired that the prize would be going to the French film Entre les murs (The Class), it was a very exciting moment for the French audience. Entre les murs is a docu-drama about a French secondary school in Paris whose students come from mixed ethnic and religious backgrounds. In the film, real students and teachers play their roles in life. When the young cast of the film joined its director Laurent Cantet on stage to receive the Palme d'Or, it was truly a "deeply moving moment", in Cantet's words. The film is based on a 2006 autobiography by Francois Begaudeau, in which a French teacher has to deal with the various problems of his different students, who present a kind of microcosm of today's France. Begaudeau, who cooperated in the writing of the screenplay, plays the role of the teacher in the movie. The experiment of having real characters reenact their lives in front of the camera is an interesting one, and Entre les murs was definitely the best of the three French films running in the competition, even if it was not, in my opinion, the best of the 22 competing films. Granted that the subject matter of the film is topical in today's multicultural world, where a need for genuine and liberating dialogue between different cultures exists, there was still a major flaw in the film to the extent that it depends too heavily on dialogue, in the narrow sense of the term. As a result, one feels that in this film there is too little cinema and too much talk, as if one were listening to a sound track rather than watching a film. The final top two awards in the competition, for Best Director and Best Screenplay, respectively, went to Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan for his film Three Monkeys and the two Belgian brothers Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne for their fascinating film Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna's Silence). The latter film was also a strong contender for the Best Director Award, which would then also have been given to the Dardenne brothers, since they, besides writing the film's screenplay, also directed the film. However, given that the festival's top three awards -- the Palme d'Or, the Grand Prix and the Jury Prize -- were given to films other than the three most powerful films in the competition in many people's opinion, namely Changeling, Three Monkeys and Lorna's Silence, these three films had to be given other, secondary awards, with Changeling getting the most unfair treatment of all. Three Monkeys, Ceylan's noir masterpiece dealing with a family riddled with secrets, definitely deserved one of the festival's top awards, perhaps the Grand Prix or the Jury Prize. However, since these two awards had been given to the two Italian films, he had to be content with the Best Director award. This left no other award for Lorna's Silence apart from Best Screenplay. Two other prizes awarded this year beside the top seven awards were the 61st Cannes Festival Award and the Camera d'Or, awarded to a film running in the Un Certain Regard competition. The latter was awarded to the UK film Hunger directed by Steve McQueen. This is the debut feature of the British-born director, who has also been the winner of the prestigious UK Turner Prize for Art. Hunger is produced by the UK TV Channel 4, and it deals with the death of the IRA leader Bobby Sands who went on a 66-day hunger strike in 1981 that lead to his death inside Northern Ireland's Maze Prison. Sands and his fellow prisoners had demanded that they be given political status and not treated as ordinary criminals, something which was refused by the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. As for the 61st Cannes Festival Award, this award is superfluous in my opinion, since while it is acceptable to give special awards on certain anniversaries, such as a silver or golden jubilee, it seems strange to give them on every occasion. However, it seems that this was an award that had been specially tailored to celebrate the career of the grand dame of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve, which was not a bad thing in itself. However, what made this award jarring was the fact that it was given jointly to Deneuve and to the veteran American actor and director Clint Eastwood. Changeling, directed by Eastwood, was the work of a great virtuoso and a very strong candidate for the Palme d'Or. Not being given the festival's top award was not necessarily a slight, but being lumped in together with Deneuve's Un conte de No�l (A Christmas Tale) was unacceptable. No wonder Eastwood did not show up at Sunday's awards ceremony. One more disappointment at this year's round was the fact that two of the most powerful films in the official competition, the Hungarian film Delta, directed by Kornel Mundruczo, and the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir, directed by Ari Folman, came out of the competition empty-handed. Both films were victims of the political logic adopted by the Jury and its president in selecting the winning films. Yet, while Delta was not a political film, Waltz with Bashir was political in every sense of the word, and it was also a very original film. A docu-animation, Waltz with Bashir combines the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who fought in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon with brilliant animation and documentary footage in a unique and original manner. Beside its artistic merit, Waltz with Bashir exposes the brutality of the Israelis and their allies, the Lebanese Phalangists, during the occupation of Beirut, and especially at the time of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, when the phalangists murdered hundreds of Palestinians under the eyes of the Israeli military. Certain disappointments aside, there is no other festival like Cannes for showcasing world cinema. While the standard of the 20- odd films selected for the official competition might vary in artistic merit from one year to the next, the other categories of the festival, including Un Certain Regard, the Out of Competition section, the Special Screening section, the Cinefondation and the competition for short films, present a real feast for cineastes and cinema fans alike, the like of which is not to be found at any other event. Cannes 2008 Awards *Palme d'Or: French film ENTRE LES MURS, directed by Laurent Cantet. *Grand Prix: Italian film GOMORRA, directed by Matteo Garrone. *Jury Prize: Italian film IL DIVO (The Star), directed by Paolo Sorrentino. *Best Director: Turkish film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan for THREE MONKEYS. *Best Actor: Benicio Del Toro for his role as Guevara in CHE, directed by Steven Soderbergh. *Best Actress: Brazilian Sandra Corveloni for her role in LINHA DE PASSE (Line of Passage), directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas. *Best Screeplay: Belgian film LE SILENCE DE LORNA (Lorna's Silence), directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. *Prize of the 61st Cannes Festival: Catherine Deneuve for UN CONTE DE NO�l (A Christama Tale) , directed by Arnaud Desplechin; and Clint Eastwood for CANGELING.
