Ali Abbasi’s beguiling, hard to categorise Swedish Film Grans (Border), about a custom officer with an evolved sense of smell, picked up the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival.
Abbasi is a Danish filmmaker with Iranian roots. The other two films with Iran connect — Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows and Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces — are competing for the main Palme d’Or.
Un Certain Regard section is devoted to newer voices and experimental films and featured India’s only contender this year—Nandita Das’ Manto .
Border was among the 18 films in competition, of which six were directorial debuts. The jury was headed by actor Benicio Del Toro.
The prize for the best director went to Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa for his harrowing political ride Donbass , which was also the opening film of the section.
The prize for best performance went to Victor Polster for playing the transvestite ballet dancer in Lukas Dhont’s Girl . The prize for best screenplay went to Meryem Benm’Barek’s Sofia and the jury special prize was awarded to Joao Salaviza and Renee Nader Messora’s The Dead and the Others . “We feel that out of the 2000 films considered by the festival, the 18 we saw in Un Certain Regard — from Argentina to China — were all in their own way winners. Over the past 10 days we were extremely impressed by the high quality of the work presented but in the end we were moved by the five films,” said Del Toro.
Burning won the International Federation of Film Critics, FIPRESCI, award with the citation that reads: “A visually stunning film and an emotionally complex comment on contemporary society”. The Fipresci award to a first or second film in the parallel sections, Directors’ Fortnight or La Semaine de la Critique went to Egy nap (One Day) by Zsófia Szilàgyi for “the precise camera work and the powerful mise-en-scène convey the extraordinary intensity and tension of an utterly ordinary situation with feeling, humour and drama.”
