CANNES, France, May 22 (Reuters) – Austrian director Sandra Wollner won the Cannes Film Festival’s second-tier Un Certain Regard selection on Friday with her understated family drama about grief, “Everytime.”
While less globally famous than the main Competition section, winning or even being selected for Un Certain Regard is a meaningful career boost.
Past selections have included work by Sofia Coppola, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Cristian Mungiu – the latter two have films in this year’s competition line-up.
Wollner used her acceptance speech to call for protecting unique personal stories in the time of artificial intelligence, which she said produces “the same of the same” to avoid risks.
“I honestly would like to hold on to those quirky, weird thoughts that maybe don’t make sense in the beginning, but hopefully stay with you maybe a little longer,” she said.
“Everytime,” Wollner’s third feature, is “an exceptionally well-calibrated study of an untimely death and its aftermath,” wrote entertainment outlet ScreenDaily in its review.
“Elephants in The Fog,” the festival’s first Nepali film and director Abinash Bikram Shah’s first feature, took the second-place jury prize.
He summoned the whole team behind the exploration of Nepal’s transgender community up on stage to celebrate, with festival director Thierry Fremaux having to usher them off to continue.
The animated French film “Iron Boy” took home the special jury prize, while Marina De Tavira, Daniela Marin Navarro and Mariangel Villegas shared the best actress prize for the Costa Rica-set “Forever Your Maternal Animal.”
Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset won best actor for “Congo Boy,” a drama about a teenager in the Central African Republic who dreams of a music career amid a civil war.
The opening film for this year’s section was Jane Schoenbruen’s exploration of sexuality and horror with actor Gillian Anderson in “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.”
(Reporting by Hanna Rantala, Writing by Miranda Murray, Editing by Nick Zieminski)
