The big guns, the Competition jury, announce their prizewinners tomorrow night, but ahead of that, there are a host of smaller, independent juries making their voices heard.
I’ve just returned from the Un Certain Regard award ceremony, a short, sweet tuxedoes-and-sneakers affair presided over by UCR jury president Claire Denis. As delighted as I was to see one of our greatest living filmmakers in the (tiny) flesh, I was less pleased with her team’s selection — by handing their top prize to Hong Sangsoo’s wispy romcom “HaHaHa,” they continued an increasingly disconcerting trend whereby films that I walk out of at major festivals are handsomely rewarded. (Hey, I wasn’t alone: James Rocchi bailed too.)
The Ecumenical Jury got that memo, too, handing their top prize to another film I didn’t finish, Xavier Beauvois’s “Of Gods and Men.” Of course, that was a gimme — if you don’t know, the Ecumenical Jury Prize was established in 1974 by a group of Christian film professionals to reward expressions of faith and/or humanism in Competition. How was the true-life tragedy of monk massacre in Algeria not going to win?
“It is finished so soon?” asked the chipper French festival volunteer manning the theater doors as I slunk out of Hong Sangsoo’s