Officially described on paper as a selection intended to highlight the original films and talents of tomorrow, Un Certain Regard is also considered the antechamber of the official competition. Suffice to say that the field is wide for the selectors who this year selected seventeen feature films from several horizons, more or less distant. France, Belgium, United States, Mexico, Haiti, Russia, Iceland, China, Norway… countries whose reality, culture or imagination have appeared to us, with various joys and more or less successful films. However, the whole (clearly focused on societal and political themes) looked rather proud. Discovering some solid promises, especially on the side of the directors who signed their first film.
Among them, and without being able to name them all: the fantastic tale Lamb, by the Icelandic Valdimar Johannsson, who, by mixing the real and the supernatural with a sure gesture, opens the doors to a nature such as we had never seen it, both terribly concrete and poetic. A world, of the Belgian director Laura Wandel, who took literally the expression “filming at child height” not to tell us but to make us feel the perception and the feelings which agitate her young characters vis-a-vis the closed world and violent from school.
Committed story
Freda, by the Haitian director Gessica Géneus, whose vibrant and touchy film – about two sisters in particular (and women in general) who are trying to find their place in Port-au-Prince where insecurity reigns – moved us . Just like the very just My brothers and I, by Yohan Manca – a story as cheerful as it is cutting edge about four brothers in search of a better future, where they live (a working-class district by the sea) or elsewhere.
Outraged Lamb which received the price of originality, another first film was rewarded, Friday July 16, by the jury A certain regard chaired by the British screenwriter and director Andrea Arnold: Civil, by the Romanian Teodora Ana Mihai, an engaged story on the disappearances of civilians in Mexico (awarded the prize for audacity). While the overall prize was awarded to Good mother, second feature film after You deserve a love (2019) by Hafsia Herzi.
The two major awards – the Un certain regard prize and the Jury Prize – respectively crowned Razzhimaya Kulaki (“The Loose Fists”) by Russian filmmaker Kira Kovalenko, a film to wake the dead and suffocate the living, shot in North Ossetia, on a mining site where each character drags his fear, his boredom and his bruised flesh. And Fat Freiheit, by Austrian Sebastian Meise, a crushing and jail-celled tale about the discrimination and criminalization of homosexuals in post-war Germany.