Cannes Festival Awards

[Jaga]

Swedish "Triangle of Sadness" was the winner. It looks that it might be an interesting movie to watch, but Polish movie by Jerzy Skolimowski about dunkey travelling across Poland to Italy also was awarded:

www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/cannes-2022-awards-winners-1235155234/

Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, a broad, raucous satire on modern-day capitalism, has won the Palme d’Or for best film at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. This is Östlund’s second Palme, after his last film, The Square, a satire on the art world, won the Palme d’Or in 2017.

Östlund’s film follows a group of super-rich models and oligarchs on a luxury cruise who have the tables turned when the ship capsizes and they end up on a desert island. The only survivor who knows how to fish or make a fire is one of the ship’s maids, who soon rises to the top of the social hierarchy. While some found Östlund’s satire a bit too broad and on the nose, it was an audience favorite at the festival.
Östlund celebrated his second Palme win as he did his first, for The Square, getting the entire audience to join him in a “primal scream of joy.”

The win for Triangle is also good news for Neon, who picked up domestic rights to the film in Cannes. The specialty distributor is on a real Palme d’Or run, having snatched up the past three Cannes winners.

Cannes Grand Prix, the runner-up prize, was awarded Ex aequo to Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon, an erotic drama with political overtones set in modern-day Nicaragua, starring Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn; and to Close, a coming-of-age story from Belgian director Lukas Dhont, a tearjerker closely inspired by the director’s own life about two 13-year-old boys whose intimate friendship is tested by the onset of puberty.

Denis used her time on stage to call for audiences to “go back to cinemas.”

Dhont accepted his prize together with Close‘s young star Eden Dambrine. He thanked his mother. “I’m here thanks to you because you helped me find my way to connect with others through films and stories.” He dedicated the prize to those “who choose tenderness over fear.”

Park Chan-wook won best director for his romantic mystery thriller Decision to Leave. The beautifully-constructed film noir stars Tang Wei as a mysterious care worker who might also be a murderer. Arthouse streaming service Mubi picked up the Korean drama for multiple territories ahead of the festival, including the U.S. and U.K.

The Cannes Jury Prize was awared ex aequo to EO by Jerzy Skolimowski, an epic journey of one donkey’s turbulent adventures across Poland and Italy; and to The Eight Mountains by Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix Van Groeningen, which follows the difficult friendship between two straight men who can’t talk about their feelings.

“I would like to thank my donkeys. All 6 of them,” Skolimowski said, accepting his award, before proceeding to call them all out by name. “Thank you donkeys!” he concluded, before giving out a loud, braying “EO!!!”

“This was a crazy thing, because we are Belgians but we made this film in Italy, with Italian actors, we learned Italian for this,” said Van Groeningen, before adding “and we also had two donkeys!”

[pieter]

Triangle of Sadness







EO by Jerzy Skolimowski




Jerzy Skolimowski



Jerzy Skolimowski (born 5 May 1938) is a Polish film director, screenwriter, dramatist and actor. A graduate of the prestigious National Film School in Łódź, Skolimowski has directed more than twenty films since his 1960 début Oko wykol (The Menacing Eye). In 1967 he was awarded the Golden Bear prize for his film Le départ. Among his other notable films is Deep End (1970),[1] starring Jane Asher and John Moulder Brown. He lived in Los Angeles for over 20 years where he painted in a figurative, expressionist mode and occasionally acted in films. He returned to Poland, and to film making as a writer and director, after a 17-year hiatus with Cztery noce z Anną (Four Nights with Anna) in 2008. He received the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2016 Venice Film Festival.




Early life

Skolimowski was born in Łódź, Poland, the son of Maria (née Postnikoff) and Stanisław Skolimowski, an architect. He often recognized indications in his work to a childhood ineradicably scarred by the War. As a small child he witnessed the brutalities of war, even having been rescued from the rubble of a bombed-out house in Warsaw. His father, a member of the Polish Resistance, was executed by the Nazis. His mother hid a Jewish family in the house and Skolimowski recalls being required to take candy from the Nazis to maintain appearances.

After the war, his mother became the cultural attaché of the Polish embassy in Prague. His fellow pupils at school in Poděbrady, a spa town near Prague, included future film-makers Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer, as well as Václav Havel.


Miloš Forman (8 February 1932 – 13 April 2018) was a Czech and American film director, screenwriter, actor, and professor who rose to fame in his native Czechoslovakia before emigrating to the United States in 1968. Forman was a fellow pupil of Jerzy Skolimowski.


Ivan Passer (10 July 1933 – 9 January 2020) was a Czech film director and screenwriter, best known for his involvement in the Czechoslovak New Wave and for directing American films such as Born to Win (1971), Cutter's Way (1981) and Stalin (1992).


Václav Havel (5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, playwright, and former dissident, who served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and then as the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs.

Skolimowski was considered as a trouble maker at school as he was the origin of many pranks which angered the authorities. At college he studied ethnography, history and literature and took up boxing, which was also the subject of a feature-length documentary, his first significant film. Skolimowski's interest in jazz and association with composer Krzysztof Komeda brought him into contact with actor Zbigniew Cybulski and directors Andrzej Munk and Roman Polanski.


Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski








Roman Polanski & Jerzy Skolimowski photographed by Aleksander Jalosiński, Warsaw 1977.

Writer and actor

In his early twenties Skolimowski was already a writer, having published several books of poems, short stories and a play. Soon Skolimowski met Andrzej Wajda, the leading director of the then dominant 'Polish school' and twelve years his senior, who showed him a script for a film about youth written by Jerzy Andrzejewski, the author of the novel Ashes and Diamonds. Skolimowski was not impressed and dismissed the script. However, in response to a challenge by Wajda, he produced his own version which became a basis for the finished film, Innocent Sorcerers (1960), directed by Wajda with Skolimowski playing a boxer.

Skolimowski enrolled in the Łódź Film School with the intention of avoiding the long apprenticeship required before graduating to feature film direction. He used the film stock available to him for student exercises, and with initial advice from Andrzej Munk, he filmed over several years in such a way that the sequences were later clipped off and joined together into one piece of work. While scoring poorly in course work Skolimowski had a finished feature film by the end of the course.
Into the movie arena

Skolimowski then collaborated with Polański, writing the dialogue for the script of Knife in the Water (1962).

Between 1964 and 1984 he completed six semi-autobiographical feature films: Rysopis, Walkover, Barrier (1966), Hands Up! (completed 1967, released 1981), Moonlighting (GB 1982) and Success Is the Best Revenge, a segment in Dialóg and two other features Le Départ (1967) and Deep End based on his original screenplays. Barrier won Grand Prix at Bergamo International Film Festival. Le Départ won the Golden Bear at the 17th Berlin International Film Festival.

While living and working in many countries, he also completed another six relatively big budget productions, including four international co-productions, between 1970 and 1992 (The Adventures of Gerard, King, Queen, Knave, The Shout, The Lightship, Torrents of Spring and Ferdydurke), all distinctly bearing Skolimowski’s signature.

Film as life

After Barrier he left Poland to make Le Départ in Belgium in French. According to him Le Départ was a light film rather than a comedy, "does not have the serious layers that I like in my work." Skolimowski returned to Poland to make Ręce do góry (Hands Up!), the third film of the Andrzej trilogy and the fourth of his Polish sextet. The anti-Stalinist themes of Hands Up! resulted in that film being banned and him being effectively expelled from then communist Poland. He then resettled in London, notably having Jimi Hendrix as a neighbor in the same building.

Between Hands Up! and his next feature, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Gerard (1970), Skolimowski contributed a story to a Czech-produced portmanteau film, Dialóg 20-40-60 (1968), in which three different directors (with Zbyněk Brynych and Peter Solan) each devised their own story using identical dialogue even though the central characters in each section are separated in age by twenty years. Skolimowski's segment, "The Twenty Year Olds", would seem to be an extension of Le Départ with Jean-Pierre Léaud playing opposite Skolimowski's wife Joanna Szczerbic.

Deep End (1970) was Skolimowski's second non-Polish feature to be based on his own original screenplay. The movie with a coming of age storyline bears distinctive thematic similarities to Le Départ. Deep End was a promising film yet it was poorly handled by the studio. His films The Shout (1978) and Moonlighting (1982) became critical successes, with Moonlighting, made in the UK and starring Jeremy Irons, the fifth of his Polish sextet, being critically and commercially his most successful film.



In America

The Lightship, Skolimowski’s first US production, was adapted from a novella by the German writer Siegfried Lenz and starring Robert Duvall and Klaus Maria Brandauer. Set on a US Coast Guard ship it was filmed in the North Sea. It is suspended between psychological duel with a doppelgänger theme and a pure performance piece within the stage-like confines of the lightship. However, even though receiving the best film award at the Venice Film Festival, The Lightship had only a very limited release.

Torrents of Spring (1989), adapted from a semi-autobiographical novella by Russian author Ivan Turgenev, was a big budget European co-production starring Timothy Hutton, Nastassja Kinski and Valeria Golino. It could be considered as Skolimowski's most impersonal 'generic' film, the only real departure from his expressed interest in making films only to please himself.



Skolimowski is also an actor, having appearances as Colonel Chaikov, a ruthless yet composed KGB colonel, in White Nights (1985) and Uncle Stepan, a Russian expatriate in Eastern Promises (2007), among other roles. In 2012, he appeared in The Avengers, as a villain interrogating Black Widow.

Later career

In 2008, he directed his first film after his return from America Cztery noce z Anną (Four Nights with Anna).



In 2010, he directed Essential Killing starring Vincent Gallo and Emmanuelle Seigner. The film won multiple awards including Special Jury Prize at the 67th Venice International Film Festival, Golden Ástor Award at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival and the Golden Lions Award for Best Film at the Gdynia Film Festival. In 2015, he directed thriller film 11 Minutes starring Richard Dormer and Andrzej Chyra. It was selected as the Polish entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 88th Academy Awards.
In July 2016, at the Venice International Film Festival, Skolimowski was honoured with the Golden Lion for "lifetime achievement".

His film EO premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Jury Prize. The Polish-Italian co-production is a contemporary interpretation of the 1966 drama film Au Hasard Balthazar directed by Robert Bresson. In 2022, he co-wrote Polanski's upcoming drama film The Palace.

Polish wiki link: pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Skolimowski

Another movie participating in Cannes

The intense friendship between two thirteen-year old boys Leo and Remi suddenly gets disrupted. Struggling to understand what has happened, Léo approaches Sophie, Rémi's mother. "Close" is a film about friendship and responsibility.

[pieter]

[pieter]

Star at Noon

[Jaga]

Pieter, thanks for posting these clips. They are interesting. Just yesterday we started watching "The square" which won Palme d'ore in 2017 by the same Swedish director as this year movie.
The square shows the absurdities of the life and also so called modern art and discusses some moral dilemma.