(Paris) The Louis-Delluc prize for the best first film went to Falcon Lake by Charlotte Le Bon, a feature film that recounts a summer vacation in a cabin by a lake in Quebec haunted by a legend.
Otherwise, Saint Omer by Alice Diop and pacification by Albert Serra are the joint winners of the Louis-Delluc 2022 prize for best film, announced Wednesday to AFP Sophie Avon, secretary general of this French prize awarded each year by a college of critics.
“From the start, these two films had the preferences of the jury. At the time of the vote, it was impossible to decide between them and the cinema needs to be supported. These are two magnificent films, in very different registers, ”said Mme Avon.
Directed by Alice Diop, Saint Omer, already awarded at the Venice Film Festival, has been nominated by France to represent it at the 2023 Oscars, in the “international feature film” category. Grand Jury Prize and First Film Prize in Venice, Saint Omer is inspired by a true story of a trial for infanticide.
The film tells the story of Laurence Coly, played by Guslagie Malanda, a Senegalese immigrant accused of killing her 15-month-old baby by abandoning her on a beach in northern France during a rising tide. Focused on the trial, Saint Omer is directly inspired by a news item from 2013 and the trial that followed.
Directed by Albert Serra starring Benoît Magimel, Pacifiction-Torment on the Islands was in competition at the last Cannes Film Festival. The film evokes the situation on the Polynesian island of Tahiti in the midst of rumors of nuclear tests.
Last year, the 2021 Louis-Delluc Prize was awarded to Onoda by Arthur Harari, a humanist fresco on the madness of a Japanese soldier.
Made up of some twenty critics and personalities, under the chairmanship of Gilles Jacob, the former president of the Cannes Film Festival, the Louis-Delluc Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for French cinema, was founded in 1937 in tribute to Louis Delluc, the first French journalist specializing in cinema and founder of film clubs, who died at the age of 33.