Et couldn’t have been an easy decision for the jury of eight filmmakers led by Ruben Östlund; After all, the film festival in Cannes experienced strong competition with big names for eleven days – from Wim Wenders to Aki Kaurismäki to Wes Anderson. The jury chose a film that is both characterized by a concise staging and a tribute to outstanding acting: “Anatomy of a Fall” (“Anatomy of a Fall”) by the French director Justine Triet.
“It’s the most intimate film I’ve ever made,” said the director at the awards ceremony. She is the third woman in the festival’s history (after New Zealander Jane Campion for Das Piano and French Julia Ducournau for Titane) to win the grand prize. In her films, Triet likes to focus on stories about artists who continue to process what they have experienced in their works, so it always triggers considerations as to whether what is happening there is a work of art at all. In her thriller, shown in Cannes, this aspect is even a main point of contention in a court hearing in which a successful writer has to defend herself against the accusation that she killed her husband. The tension draws entirely on the acting of the main actress, Sandra Hüller.
The German actress was also seen in a second film this year, in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”, which was based on the novel by the recently deceased writer Martin Amis and also received an award in Cannes: it received the Grand Prix, the Great Jury Prize. Glazer shows the life of the family of the camp commander of Auschwitz, shifting the horror of the concentration camp to the audio level and putting the perfect family idyll in stark contrast in front of the camera. Here, too, Hüller played the leading role alongside the German actor Christian Friedel.
However, the jury awarded the prize for best actress to Merve Dizdar from Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film “About Dry Grasses”. This decision cannot have been easy either.
