By Jake Coyle – Associated Press Film Writer
Cannes, France ( Associated Press) – Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s class warfare comedy “Triangle of Sadness” won the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, giving Ostlund one of cinema’s most prestigious awards for the second time.
Ostlund had already won the top Cannes honor for his film “The Square” in 2017. The “Triangle of Sadness”, which features Woody Harrelson as a Marxist yacht captain and has a climactic scene of massive vomiting, takes the satire even further.
“We wanted (for people) to go out together after the screening and do something to talk about,” Ostlund said. “We all agree that the unique thing with cinema is that we are watching together. So we have to save something to talk about but we should also have fun and be entertained.”
The jury’s second prize, the Grand Prix, was shared between Lucas Dhont’s tender boyhood drama “Close” and director Claire Dennis’s film “Stars at Noon”.
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Korean star Song Kang Ho won the Best Actor award for his performance in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Broker”, about a Korean family looking for a home for an abandoned child.
Song, who starred in Bong Joon Ho’s Palme d’Or-winning film “Parasite” at Cannes three years ago, said, “I want to thank everyone who appreciates Korean cinema.”
Tsar Amir Ibrahimi won Best Actress for her performance as a journalist in Ali Abbasi’s “Holy Spider”, a true-crime thriller about a serial killer who targets sex workers in the Iranian religious city of Mashhad. Violent and graphic, “Holy Spider” was not allowed to be shot in Iran and was instead made in Jordan. Accepting the award, Ibrahimi stated that the film depicts “impossible to show in Iran”.
The awards were selected by a nine-member jury headed by French actor Vincent Lindon.
The jury prize was divided between “The Eight Mountains”, the story of Charlotte Vandermarsch and Felix Van Groeningen’s friendship, and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s “EO”, which is about a donkey’s journey in a miserable modern Europe.
“I want to thank my donkeys,” said Skolimowski, who used six donkeys when making the film.
Swedish-Egyptian filmmaker Tariq Saleh took home best screenplay to Cannes for “Boy From Heaven,” a thriller set in Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque.
This year’s award for Best Debut went to Riley Keough and Gina Gammel for “War Pony”, a drama about the Pine Ridge Reservation, in collaboration with the Camera d’Or, Oglala Lakota and Sikangu Lakota Nationals.
Saturday’s closing ceremony closed Cannes, which has attempted to completely revive the annual France extravaganza that was canceled in 2020 by the pandemic and saw modest crowds last year. This year’s celebration also opened against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, which sparked red-carpet protests and a dialogue about the purpose of cinema in war.
Last year, French body horror thriller “Titan” took home the top prize at Cannes, making director Julia DeCornau the second female filmmaker to win the Palme. In 2019, Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” won at Cannes before doing so at the Academy Awards.
This year, the biggest Hollywood films at Cannes — “Elvis,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Three Thousand Years of Longing” — were played outside the competition lineup of 21 Cannes films. But her presence helped restore Cannes’s glamor after the festival had been decimated for the past two years.
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