Anora, an explicit and often hilarious story about a New York erotic dancer, on Saturday won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, which also saw a first-ever win for a trans actress.
Anora director Sean Baker was confirmed as one of the leading voices of US indie cinema with the prize, which also promises to make a star of 25-year-old Mikey Madison. She plays a dancer who strikes gold with a wealthy client, only to face the wrath of his Russian oligarch parents.
As head of the jury, director Greta Gerwig praised Anora as an “incredible, human and humane film that captured our hearts.”
Photo: AP
“This literally has been my singular goal for the past 30 years, so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my life,” said Baker, who made the acclaimed Red Rocket and The Florida Project.
He dedicated the prize to all sex workers and appealed for filmmakers to “keep cinema alive.”
“This means making films intended for theatrical exhibition,” the 53-year-old said. “The world has to be reminded that watching a film at home while scrolling through your phone and checking e-mails and half paying attention is just not the way — although some tech companies would like us to think so.”
Photo: Reuters
The 77th edition of the festival on the French Riviera saw several highly charged feminist and political movies, and lots of gore and sex.
A trans woman won best actress for the first time, as Karla Sofia Gascon took the award for her role in the audacious musical Emilia Perez, in which she plays a Mexican narco boss who becomes a woman.
The jury shared it between Gascon and her costars Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz — saying they were rewarding the “harmony of sisterhood” — although only Gascon was at the ceremony.
She dedicated it to “all the trans people who are suffering.”
“We all have the opportunity to change for the better, to be better people,” Gascon said. “If you have made us suffer, it is time for you also to change.”
There were fewer meaty roles for men this year. Jesse Plemons took the prize for Yorgos Lanthimos’ bizarro series of short stories, Kinds of Kindness, although he was not present to accept it.
A devastating Iranian film about a family torn apart by the country’s recent women-led protests, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, was given a special jury prize for “drawing attention to unsustainable injustice.”
Its director, Mohammad Rasoulof, 51, escaped from Iran to avoid a lengthy prison sentence just before the festival.
Rasoulof said his heart was with the film’s crew, “still under the pressure of the secret services back in Iran.”
“I am also very sad, deeply sad, to see the disaster experienced by my people every day ... the Iranian people live under a totalitarian regime,” he said.
The second-place Grand Prix went to All We Imagine as Light, the first Indian entry in 30 years. It wowed critics with its poetic monsoon-set portrayal of two women who have migrated to Mumbai to work as nurses.
Emilia Perez also won the third-place Jury Prize for its French director, Jacques Audiard.
Best director went to Portugal’s Miguel Gomes for Grand Tour, an oblique tale about a man abandoning his fiancee and traveling around Asia.
Best screenplay went to The Substance starring Demi Moore, an ultra-gory horror film about the pressures women face to maintain bodily perfection as they age.
“What an incredible gift it has been to work with you,” writer and director Coralie Fargeat told Moore from the stage.
The film is “about women and what women can still experience in the world. We need a revolution, and I don’t think it has really started yet,” she said.
Star Wars creator George Lucas received an honorary Palme d’Or from his friend Francis Ford Coppola, who competed this year with the highly divisive Megalopolis.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS