Two eastern European films dealing with abortion dominated the prizes at the closing ceremony of the 60th Festival de Cannes last night.
The most coveted award, the Palme d'Or, was given to Romanian director Cristian Mungiu for Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which takes its title from the age of the foetus aborted in his grim, searing drama set in the late 1980s, before the fall of the Ceausescu regime.
In awards presented by separate juries at Cannes, the only Irish film selected for the festival this year, Garage, was the winner of the annual Art et Essai prize presented by the International Confederation of Arthouse Cinemas. Its international jury represents more than 3,000 cinemas in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, and the Cannes award reflects its mission "to promote quality motion pictures on cinema screens and to defend the right for cultural diversity".
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson from a screenplay by Mark O'Halloran, Garagewas screened outside of the main competition in the prestigious Directors Fortnight section. Set in a rural Irish town, it stars Pat Shortt as a simple man who unwittingly triggers a crisis in his life. The film was produced by Ed Guiney of Element Pictures, the Dublin-based company which co-produced late year's Palme d'Or winner, The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Daystakes place over a single day and night as one young college student helps another prepare for an abortion, which was illegal in Romania at the time. The best actor award went to Russian actor Konstantin Lavronenko for The Banishment, in which he plays a man who forces his wife to have an abortion after she tells him she is pregnant and that he is not the father. The award was a surprise given the critical derision of what was widely regarded as a pretentious, over-extended drama.
There were many more surprises at Cannes last night, when Joel and Ethan Coen's widely admired Cormac McCarthy adaptation, No Country For Old Men, went home empty-handed, and again when the jury gave the special 60th anniversary prize to US director Gus Van Sant for Paranoid Park.
The award for best director was given to US painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel for his thought-provoking, life-affirming French-language production The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the best-selling 1997 book by Jean-Dominique Bauby. The best actress award went to Jeon Do-yeon for her affecting portrayal of a piano teacher distraught after the abduction and murder of her young son in the simmering South Korean drama Secret Sunshine. Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase received the Grand Prix du Jury for The Mourning Forest.