(Paris) Director Arthur Harari won the Louis-Delluc Prize for his film on Wednesday Onoda, 10,000 nights in the jungle, humanist fresco on the madness of a Japanese soldier.
Updated at 2:15 p.m. yesterday
The filmmaker, born in 1981, succeeds documentary maker Sébastien Lifshitz, who won last year, the president of this prize, one of the most prestigious in French cinema, Gilles Jacob, told AFP.
In his film, Arthur Harari paints in nearly three hours the portrait of a Japanese soldier who wanted neither peace nor death, and who continued to fight thirty years after the Second World War.
Composed of around twenty critics and personalities, chaired by the former president of the Cannes Film Festival, the Louis-Delluc Prize jury also awarded, in the first film category, Towards the battle, by Aurélien Vernhes-Lermusiaux.
Shot in Cambodia and in Japanese, Onoda had been screened in Cannes at the opening of the Un certain regard section, but it had left empty-handed from the Cannes fortnight. Released in the midst of a health crisis, it only made 45,512 theaters.
Its draft by the Louis-Delluc prize is a great consolation prize for a film hailed by critics, and the jury has also announced that it wants a new theatrical release to be organized.
“If we find the possibility of having a significant output, we will do it”, reacted to AFP the distributor of the film Jean Labadie, estimating that the health passport had “killed the film” in theaters. Not won however: the cinemas remain “congested by all the films which have accumulated” since the beginning of the health crisis, underlines the boss of the Pact.
“Amazing movie”
Onoda and its director, of which this is the second film after Black Diamond (2016), won against confirmed filmmakers who were also in the running (Valérie Lemercier for Aline, Arnaud Desplechin for Deception, Bruno Dumont for France…).
Onoda “Is a magnificent film about the meaning of life based on an extraordinary story,” added the general secretary of the award, Sophie Avon, critic at South West.
The subject is itself astounding with this soldier who does not understand that the war is over, underlined Gilles Jacob. “The winner was chosen almost unanimously, which is not frequent”.
With this second feature film, the director looks back on the life of Onoda, an emblematic figure in Japanese history, who, by going into exile for nearly thirty years in the jungle in the Philippines, refused the Japanese surrender of 1945.
An intimate and interior odyssey of a loser of the Second World War who preferred denial to reality, bringing with him several comrades of misfortune, but also a historical fresco on the madness of a soldier.
Hero or antihero? The film does not stand out, even if it is precisely this ambivalence that seduced the director. “I couldn’t decide on his courage or his lack of courage. I think he is as much a coward as he is a brave man. That’s what interested me in this story, it’s the contradictory dimension, ”he explained in Cannes.
“When I discovered this story, it immediately fascinated me. I think it was the question, in a way, of refusing to accept reality as it is that jumped out at me, ”he added.
An extraordinary destiny “which goes beyond strictly moral questions”. “It’s morally complicated to judge, but it’s humanly interesting,” he said.
Very worked with its long tracking shots, the staging manages to underline the mystery of a being difficult to define, but whose stubbornness has everything of a mystical quest.
The filming of this international production, in Japanese, was also a challenge for Arthur Harari, who does not speak the language.