Cannes 2014 Roundup: 5 Movies That Won

The winners of the most prestigious and publicised film festival in the world, The Cannes International Film Festival, have been recently announced, and therefore all the movie buffs should be excited to see these 5 movies.

1.Winter Sleep (won the Palme d’Or and the FIPRESCI Prize) is a 2014 Turkish drama film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The story is set in Anatolia and examines the significant divide between the rich and poor as well as the powerful and powerless in Turkey.

 
The longest film in competition by far, Winter Sleep’s Palme d’Or marked the culmination of the career of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who has twice received the festival’s second-place honor, the Grand Prix (for 2002’s Uzak and for 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) and who won a directing prize for 2008’s Three Monkeys.

 
Ceylan said in his acceptance speech that it was “a great surprise” when he took the stage, noting that it was perhaps a fitting choice in a year that marked the 100th anniversary of Turkish cinema.

2.The Wonders (was awarded with the Grand Prix)is an Italian drama film directed by Alice Rohrwacher. The film centers on a German-Italian family, like Rohrwacher’s own, though the filmmaker is the first to declare her work isn’t autobiographical. Le Meraviglie follows the coming-of-age of the oldest daughter in a rural family, headed by a domineering beekeeper father, amidst a profound transformation of the countryside where she grew up.

 
The director described her film like this: “There are many concentric circles in the movie. The widest tells of the Italian landscape, its destruction and its transformation into a sort of theme park. The best-known book of the great urban sociologist Saskia Sassen is called Variation on a Theme Park and reveals how cities are now turning into theme parks. The same is happening to the countryside, and perhaps it is even more painful because cities are, for the most part, artificial, while rural areas should be human landscapes. The human landscape was one of the great Italian heritages, an integral part of who we are. Our times have turned everything into “scenery.”

3.Mommy (won the Jury Prize) is a 2014 Canadian drama film directed by Xavier Dolan. The film stars Anne Dorval as Diane Després, a widowed mother who is overwhelmed by the difficulty of raising her troubled, sometimes violent son Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon) as a single parent, who begins to receive assistance and support from her mysterious new neighbour Kyla (Suzanne Clément)

 
In 2009, director Xavier Dolan rose to prominence with the semi-autobiographical feature film “I Killed My Mother.” Dolan was only 20 years old when he wrote, directed and starred in the film, which won three awards at Cannes. “Mommy” is Dolan’s fifth feature film in as many years. Returning to his debut subject matter, Dolan explores the intricacies and pitfalls of the mother-son bond once more, this time with Anne Dorval as the titular mother, Diane “Die” Despres, and Antoine-Olivier Polin as her 15-year-old son, Steve. Die, who is recently widowed, struggles to control Antoine’s behavior, but the duo finds a tentative balance when they forge a relationship with Kyla (Suzanne Clement), a high school teacher on sabbatical who moves in next door.

 
While it is tempting to compare “Mommy” to “I Killed My Mother,” Dolan himself insists that the parallels between the two films are superficial. He describes the difference between the two as such: “Back in the days of ‘I Killed My Mother,’ I felt like I wanted to punish my mom. Only five years have passed ever since, and I believe that, through ‘Mommy,’ I’m now seeking her revenge.”

4.“Foxcatcher” (won the best director prize) The U.S. feature, “Foxcatcher,” starred an unrecognizable Steve Carrell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo in a mesmerizing, particularly American horror story of seduction, rejection, betrayal and murder in the little-known world of Olympic wrestling. It won the best director prize for Bennett Miller. The director thanked his trio of stars and Megan Ellison, whose Annapurna Films was Foxcatcher’s” key backer. “It’s really something to be supported like that,” he said, “and to come out the other side.”

 
“Foxcatcher” might be the culmination of years of research, but Cannes certainly didn’t see the last of it. The film is already at the center of some serious 2015 Oscar buzz, with Indiewire positioning it as a frontrunner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.

5. “Party Girl” (Winner, Camera d’Or and Ensemble Prize)
“Party Girl” is the work of writer-director trio Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger and Samuel Theis. Following loosely in the cinema verite tradition — a form of documentary filmmaking in which real-life situations are staged or provoked and then recorded by filmmakers — “Party Girl” is a semi-fictionalized portrait of Angelique Litzenburger. Angelique is a 60-year-old bar hostess whose fondness of parties and suitors has not diminished with age. The events of the film are staged but true to life; the filmmakers were inspired by Angelique’s recent wedding, and they use the film to explore the relationship between Angelique and Michel, a regular customer who eventually asks to marry her. With one exception, the cast of “Party Girl” is composed of nonprofessional actors. The directors encouraged the cast to improvise dialogue, informing them of a scene’s sequence, context and key conflicts before allowing them to proceed without lines or a script. The result is a film that aims “never to constrain reality, but to remain open to what it had to offer.”

Credits: Cannes Festival 2014 PRESS CONFERENCE – Winners