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| Arieh Worthalter named best actor for his portrayal of the Jewish far-left activist Pierre Goldman in The Goldman Case Photo: Richard Mowe |
As the helter-skelter of the awards seasons gathers momentum, the French film industry has fired its first salvo. Last night in Paris at the Forum des Images, the Lumière Awards, the Gallic equivalent of the Golden Globes, were bestowed by foreign journalists and critics based in France.
It was perhaps no surprise that Justine Triet’s trial drama Anatomy Of A Fall continued its meteoric round of acclaim which began at the Cannes Film Festival with the Palme d’Or (Triet being only the third woman run the history of the awards to win the top prize).
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| German actress Sandra Hüller - best actress award in the Lumières Photo: Les Films Pelléas |
The film also won Best Screenplay for Triet and her husband Arthur Harari (also nominated as an actor for The Goldman Case) and best actress for German star Sandra Huller. Worth noting is the fact the film has seven BAFTA nominations and it has already scooped two Golden Globes (for Screenplay and Foreign Language Film).
Thomas Cailley was designated best director his his ecological family drama The Animal Kingdom which was one of the hits of the UK’s French Film Festival and earlier had opened Un Certain Regard sidebar in Cannes.
Cédric Kahn’s controversial courtroom drama based on real events, The Goldman Case, won a best actor gong for Arieh Worthalter for his portrayal of the Jewish far-left activist Pierre Goldman who appealed his life-imprisonment sentence for four armed robberies involving the death of two women.
Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters, which is on the Oscars shortlist, scored the Best Documentary prize, dealing with a Tunisian woman named Olfa Hamrouni who endured a living nightmare when her two eldest daughters became radicalised by the infamous Muslim extremists ISIS and disappeared. The delightful Linda Wants Chicken by Chiara Malta and Sébastian Laudenbach was named best animated film.
Vietnamese director Trần Anh Hùng, who has based himself in France, made the cut at the Lumières with a best cinematography award (for Jonathan Ricquebourg and his work on The Taste Of Things) for which Hung won Best Director at Cannes. Controversially, the film will represent France at the Oscars, when many in the industry believed that Anatomy Of A Fall would have been a more adventurous choice.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s feature About Dry Grasses (Turkey’s Oscar submission) won Best International Coproduction.
The French film world now is limbering up for the Cesar Awards, nominations for which will be unveiled on 24 January with the ceremony scheduled for 23 February at Paris’s fabled music hall, the Olympia.
The awards in full:
Best Film
- Anatomy Of A Fall by Justine Triet
Best Director
- Thomas Cailley, The Animal Kingdom
Best Screenplay
- Justine Triet, Arthur Harari for Anatomy Of A Fall
Best Documentary
- Four Daughters by Kaouther Ben Hania
Best Animation
- Chicken For Linda! by Chiara Malta & Sébastien Laudenbach
Best Actress
- Sandra Hüller for Anatomy Of A Fall
Best Actor
- Arieh Worthalter for The Goldman Case
Female Revelation
- Ella Rumpf for Marguerite’s Theorem
Male Revelation
- Raphaël Quenard for Junkyard Dog
Best First Film
- The Rapture by Iris Kaltenbäck
Best International Coproduction
- About Dry Grasses by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cinematography
- Jonathan Ricquebourg for The Taste Of Things
Best Music
- Vitalic for Disco Boy
