The Palme d'Or and other main competition prizes won't be announced until Sunday evening, but Cannes has begun to give out awards. In addition to "Take Shelter" winning the top prize in the Critics Week competition and "Atmen" ("Breathing") and "The Giants" winning awards in the independent Directors' Fortnight section, the Cinefondation section of student films has handed out its awards.
Doroteya Droumeva's German student film "The Letter" has been awarded First Prize in the section, which consisted of 16 films. Kamal Lazraq's "Drari" and Son Tae-gyum's "Fly By Night" were chosen as the second and third place winners, respectively, by a jury headed by writer-director Michel Gondry.
And Damien Duquesne also won a prize at Cannes – but he's a chef, not a filmmaker, and he triumphed over a Russian chef in the first Le Menu de Cannes cooking competition. The winner was allowed to cook a meal for the Cannes jury; Duquesne's main course was salt cod on an algae broth.
The winning menu is at the chef's 750 grammes website, though you'll have to read French to get it all.
Jury president Robert De Niro was also one of the many guests to show up at Thursday night's amFAR "Cinema Against AIDS" dinner, an annual fundraising event at the Hotel Du Cap that this year paid tribute to AIDS crusader Elizabeth Taylor.
The most high-profile of all Cannes parties, this year's bash raised more than $10 million and attracted De Niro, Janet Jackson, Sean Penn, Kanye West, Harvey Weinstein and Jane Fonda (above) and many others. Milla Jovovich and Courtney Love performed, and the top item at an elaborate auction was a tennis match with Monaco's Prince Albert II, which went for 500,000 Euros. (Photo by Francois Durand/Getty Images)
Getting back to De Niro, Peter Howell tries to guess which films the jury prez might respond to at the Toronto Star's website. He suspects that De Niro (whom he calls "Bobby") will be more likely to embrace "Le Havre," "The Kid With a Bike," "The Artist" or even "Habemus Papam" (which was not well-liked by critics) over "more substantial fare" like "The Tree of Life."
Unless, Howell, says, De Niro decides to use his jury clout to "atone for the many bad movies he's made in recent years."
J. Hoberman, on the other hand, would really like to know what would have happened if Lars von Trier hadn’t sounded off on Wednesday – because if he hadn't, Hoberman thinks, the Palme d'Or race might well have come down to "The Tree of Life" vs. "Melancholia."
He thinks that with von Trier's ill-considered outburst, though, "Tree of Life'" is positioned to sweep the table – but because he doesn’t like that movie, he proposes an alternative slate of winners: "The Artist" for the Palme d'Or, "Le Havre" for the runner-up Grand Prix and "Michael" for the Prix du Jury; acting awards for Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst; best director to the Dardenne brothers for "The Kid With a Bike"; and best screenplay to Joseph Cedar for "Footnote."
And finally, the von Trier fallout just keeps on coming. On Friday, his business partner Aalbaek Jensen became the latest to blast the director for his comments about Hitler and Nazis and fellow Danish director Susanne Bier.
"We would like to make it perfectly clear that Zentropa does not share Lars von Trier's view of what might be funny to say at a press conference, and that his comments are a direct contradiction of Zentropa's values," said Jensen, who shares a 25 percent stake in the production company with von Trier.
The statement also apologized "to all persons, business partners, staff and institutions that, in connection with Lars von Trier's comments, have been inflicted in any way." In addition, it expressed regrets to Bier, whose Oscar-wining film "In a Better World" was produced by Zentropa.
And another Danish director, Nicolas Winding Refn, characterized von Trier's comments as "very, very mean" to Steven Zeitchik, and added that provocation like that makes sense coming from an 18-year-old, but "it's kind of pathetic when you're a 60-year-old man."
And Howard Feinstein told von Trier that Refn had criticized him — to which the 55-year-old director responded, "I've known him since he was a kid. F*** him."
