Animation I Lost My Body wins in Cannes Critics’ Week

Our Mothers and Vivarium also rewarded

by Richard Mowe

I Lost My Body
I Lost My Body Photo: Courtesy of La Semaine de la Critique

As the Cannes Film Festival gears up for its closing awards ceremony on Saturday (25 May) already some sections of the event have announced their accolades.

Critics’ Week or the Semaine de la Critique have bestowed the top award, the Nespresso Grand Prize, on the animated tale I Lost My Body (J’ai Perdu Mon Corps) by Jeremy Clapin, in which a cut-off hand escapes from a dissection lab with one crucial goal: to get back to its body. As it scrambles through the pitfalls of Paris, it remembers its life with the young man it was once attached to… until they met Gabrielle.

It is one of 11 titles featured in the Competition with a jury headed by Ciro Guerra, whose Birds Of Passage is currently on release in the UK.

The prize for best screenplay awarded by the French writers’ guild the SACD went to Our Mothers (Nuestras Madres), a debut film by writer-director Cesar Diaz. It is set in Guatemala in 2013, when the country was living through the trials of the military leaders responsible for the civil war. Diaz was born in Guatemala in 1978, studied in Mexico and Belgium before going the Parisian film school La Fémis.

Vivarium, by the Irish director Lorcan Finnegan, took the Gan Foundation Award for distribution (amounting to 20.000 euros to support the distribution of the film in France). The film tells the story of a young couple in search of a starter home who follow a mysterious estate agent and get trapped in a strange housing development.

Ingvar Sigurosson took the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award for his performance as a father losing his grip after his wife's death in Hlynur Palmason's A White, White Day.

In the short-film category, Qui Yang's She Runs scooped the Leitz Cine Discovery Prize and Andreas Hogenni's Without Bad Intention won the CanalPlus Award.

Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots in Lorcan Finnegan’s science fiction film Vivarium
Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots in Lorcan Finnegan’s science fiction film Vivarium Photo: Screen Ireland
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