Latest news with #Imago
Daily Tribune
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Tribune
Chechen film, Assange documentary win prizes in Cannes
The first Chechen film to screen at the Cannes Festival won best documentary, while a film about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange picked up a special prize on Friday. Deni Oumar Pitsaev won the festival's Golden Eye award for his autobiographical documentary Imago, which follows the filmmaker after he inherits a small patch of land in the Pankisi valley in Georgia, across the border from Chechnya in southern Russia. During the two Chechen wars of 1994–1996 and 1999–2009, the region became a refuge for Chechen rebels and thousands of civilian refugees who crossed Georgia's porous mountain border to flee the conflict. Pitsaev — who grew up between Grozny, Saint Petersburg and Almaty, and is now based between Brussels and Paris — was also awarded a prize in the festival's Critics' Week section on Wednesday. US director Eugene Jarecki was awarded a special jury prize for his documentary The Six Billion Dollar Man, about Assange, who has been in Cannes to promote the film but has not yet spoken publicly. Assange has declined all interview requests, but the 53-year-old former hacker's wife, Stella Assange, said he had 'recovered' from his years in detention and would 'speak when he's ready.' Assange was released from a high-security British prison in June last year after a plea bargain with the US government over WikiLeaks's work publishing top-secret military and diplomatic information. He spent five years behind bars fighting extradition from Britain and another seven holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London, where he claimed political asylum.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Imago' Wins L'Oeil d'Or Prize For Top Documentary At Cannes; Julian Assange Film Wins Special Jury Prize For l'Oeil d'Or 10th Anniversary
Imago, a documentary by Chechen-born filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev, won the L'Oeil d'or prize today, the top award for nonfiction film at the Cannes Film Festival. But it wasn't the only award presented by the jury. The Six Billion Dollar Man, director Eugene Jarecki's film about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, won a Special Jury Prize marking the 10th anniversary of the L'Oeil d'or prize. Both directors were on hand for the announcement at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes. More from Deadline Thailand's Engfa Waraha & Dream Thanika Jenjesda Want 'Lady Bee' To Re-Define The Female Gaze In Thai Filmmaking - Cannes Studio Cannes Film Festival 2025: Read All Of Deadline's Movie Reviews Bi Gan's 'Resurrection' Hits Cannes With 7-Minute Ovation At World Premiere 'I didn't expect at all,' Pitsaev told Deadline after receiving the award. He said it might prove challenging to get the metal Golden Eye trophy through airport security. 'I hope they will not see it as a weapon. I mean, you can hurt someone with that.' Assange joined Jarecki at today's announcement. He has been a free man for only a year, after reaching a deal with U.S. authorities that saw him plead guilty to a single count of violating the Espionage Act. Assange appeared to become emotional as he spoke at the L'Oeil d'or ceremony. He said his last previous public comment was made at the Parliamentary Assembly of Europe, which declared him to have been persecuted as a political prisoner. 'Now is a time of great erosion of norms, coming from the conflict in Ukraine,' he said, 'and especially from the assault on the people in Gaza, the massacre of people in Gaza and also in the West Bank.' He suggested the U.S. was absent in terms of supporting human rights and that Europe needed to fill the void. 'There doesn't appear to be any other grouping of countries or major power on the only planet we live in that will stand, will fight for those norms that we all realized were important after all.' Jarecki told Deadline he viewed the awarding of the L'Oeil d'or Special Jury Prize to his film as consistent with a politically firm stand taken by the festival. 'I do think this is a seismic development within the Cannes Film Festival, my movie aside,' he noted. 'Just the fact that you can feel the festival leaning into documentary much more than ever before, leaning into the serious issues that are flying around the world right now. If you look at what showed at the festival this year, the dedication of the festival to Fatima [Hassouna, a Palestinian photojournalist killed in Gaza], there's extremely important stuff going on. And I think the way the psyche of the festival has shifted, we need that… We need more and more people to step up and get concerned and get engaged. And I came here not knowing what to expect of that, of how a festival of poetry and fantasy and romance would be dealing with a modern era where we all have such grave concerns and they're leaning into it.' Pitsaev's film earlier won the Jury Prize at Critics Week, the Cannes sidebar. His film is set in a remote area of Georgia, a few kilometers from the border with Chechnya. 'When Déni inherits a small patch of land in the wild, beautiful valley of Pankissi, he sees a chance to finally build the house in the trees that he's dreamed of since he was a boy,' reads a synopsis of the film. 'But nothing in the rugged Caucasus is ever simple. Returning to a village just across the Chechen border where he was born – a place he barely knows – Déni stirs up old feuds, buried family dramas, and above all, the question everyone keeps asking: when, and with whom, is he finally going to get married?' In an interview in Cannes on Thursday, Pitsaev told us he came to Cannes not knowing how the film would be received. 'For the premiere, I felt a little bit naked in front of the public,' Pitsaev commented. 'It's so intimate. And when I was doing the film and especially in editing, it was difficult for me to watch myself and [decide] what to take out, what not to put in a film.' The L'Oeil d'or prize comes with a €5,000 award. Eligible films can premiere in Competition, Un Certain Regard, Out of Competition, Midnight Screenings and Special Screenings, Directors' Fortnight, Critics' Week, or the ACID sidebar. Julie Gayet, French actress and producer, served as Jury President for the L'Oeil d'or prize. Her fellow jurors included Chilean filmmaker Carmen Castillo; Frédéric Maire, Swiss director of the Cinémathèque suisse; Juliette Favreul Renaud, French producer, and Marc Zinga, a Congolese-Belgian actor. The L'Oeil d'or is a relatively new award in the Cannes pantheon, added only in 2015. It was created by SCAM, France's Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia. Previous winners of the award include documentaries that went on to earn Oscar nominations: Four Daughters, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania; Faces Places, directed by Agnès Varda and JR; For Sama, directed by Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts, and All That Breathes, directed by Shaunak Sen. Best of Deadline 'The Last of Us' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? 'The Last Of Us': Differences Between HBO Series & Video Game Across Seasons 1 And 2 Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Imago' Director Déni Oumar Pitsaev On Winning Two Prizes In Cannes: 'I Didn't Expect It At All'
When Chechen-born filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev came to Cannes with his new documentary Imago, he felt very uncertain about how it would be received. After all, it's a personal story and it's set in a place far from the experience of most people – a remote enclave in a corner of Georgia called Pankissi, very close to the border with Chechnya. But Pitsaev has received the kind of validation in Cannes that filmmakers only dream of, winning two prizes: the L'Oeil d'or for the top documentary at Cannes, and the jury prize at Critics Week. More from Deadline Palm Dog: 'The Love That Remains', 'Sirât', 'Pillion' And 'Amores Perros' Honored - Cannes Film Festival Foul Play Suspected In Cannes Power Outage With Electricity Pylons Sabotaged Cannes Power Restored; Festival Closing Ceremony To Go Ahead As Planned In Wake Of Five-Hour Power Outage In South Of France 'I didn't expect it at all,' Pitsaev told Deadline Friday after the L'Oeil d'or announcement. A day earlier, he shared similar sentiments after winning the French Touch Prize of the Jury from Critics Week. We spoke on the beach at the Plage Miramar as high winds whipped waves in the Mediterranean a few feet away. 'For the moment, it's like an adrenaline rush,' he commented. 'It's going to be a big help for the film for sure. I mean, my producers, they're happier than I am for the moment.' Imago begins with the filmmaker contemplating what to do with a plot of land his mother has given him in Pankissi. Should he sell it? Build a house there? If he goes the house route, what kind should he build? For Pitsaev, who lives in Brussels and Paris, dealing with the Pankissi property involves returning to a place of some painful memories, and reengaging with complicated family dynamics. When Déni was only a few months old, his mom left his dad, and mother and child moved to Kazakhstan, 'defying Chechen tradition that dictates divorced women must leave their children behind,' as Pitsaev writes in a director's statement. 'My grandfather forbade her to return home, but she refused to abandon me.' After his grandfather died a few years later, Pitsaev and his mom moved back to Chechnya. He grew up in the '90s in a chaotic time for the former autonomous Soviet republic, as Chechnya tried to assert independence from Russia. 'We had two wars. The first war started in 1994, and I was like eight years old or something. It's my first experience with war,' Pitsaev recalled. 'When the second war started, it was a few years later in 1999 after Putin arrived in power in Russia… [Starting] the war in Chechnya, it was his first move, actually. And we forget about this; what's happened in Ukraine today, it didn't come from nowhere. It was already there 25 years ago.' As Russian bombing devastated parts of Chechnya, Pitsaev and his mother moved to St. Petersburg. But as a Chechen, he became an immediate object of prejudice. 'It's a really strange thing because you're still a child and you are innocent. You've done nothing wrong and you are a victim of what's happening. It's not Chechnya who invaded Russia. It's Russia who invaded Chechnya and it's Russian bombs killing the people inside of Chechnya,' he said. 'When you're in Russia, they hate you. But for what? I mean, it's like schizophrenic. You don't understand. You are a victim.' His mother encouraged him to change his name to something more Russian sounding: Andrey Andreyevich. 'It was a traumatic experience as a child to change my first name and last name,' he recalled. 'It was like a Russification of my name to protect me from the harassment in school and not to be bullied — not only by children but also by teachers. The teacher in school would say, 'Why we don't stop the war in Chechnya now? It will be easier if we drop an atomic bomb there.' And then you're terrified and you are thinking, 'Does the teacher know that I'm from Chechnya?' You are so scared, and you feel, oh, maybe someone will know. Or maybe my accent will be wrong. You try to do better so your Russian is perfect. It's quite a terrible thing, actually.' For Pitsaev, going back to Pankissi meant facing the strictures and conformity of a quite traditional society. In his director's statement, the filmmaker writes, 'I cannot return to Chechnya today. For political reasons, the land of my childhood is closed to me. It exists now only in memory—a place of freedom and loss. My mother's gift of land in Pankissi felt like a bridge to that unreachable past, but it came with expectations: build a house, start a family, grow the clan. Become 'a Chechen man.'' In the film, Pitsaev is constantly asked when he's going to get married. And when he shows family members the design for the house he wants to build – a modern A-frame, elevated from the ground — they react with a degree of alarm. Both he, a single man, and his house would stick out. Pitsaev's father appears in the film – a genial man who remarried and has two teenage sons with his new wife. Pitsaev tries to confront perhaps the most painful memory of all from his childhood – why his father didn't come for him. There is no simple answer to that question. Traditions and expectations of masculinity bear on his dad's decision to stay away. 'My approach was kind of gentle with them and it's not a big clash in the film,' he said. 'I didn't want to make too much drama, because the film is all about the things we say and especially the things we don't say, and about the silence — almost like secrets, going around things, always playing with them, playing with the words, what we say in words and what we say by our body movements, like body language.' Pitsaev tells Deadline he's now at work on a narrative-fiction film. Imago, meanwhile, will be released in cinemas in France in late October. 'We're more than happy that people can see the film on a big screen as it was planned,' he said. 'All of the images and also sound, all the work we did, it's done for cinema theater to have the full experience.' Pitsaev added, 'For international sales, we're dealing with Beijing-based company Rediance. And we hope they will bring the film all over the world. But yeah, we'll for sure have a New York premiere soon as well.' Best of Deadline 'Poker Face' Season 2 Guest Stars: From Katie Holmes To Simon Hellberg Everything We Know About Amazon's 'Verity' Movie So Far Everything We Know About 'The Testaments,' Sequel Series To 'The Handmaid's Tale' So Far
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Neon Taking North American Rights To Natalie Portman Cannes Animation ‘Arco'
EXCLUSIVE: Neon is closing up a North America deal for rights to Natalie Portman-voiced animation Arco, which recently launched at the Cannes Film Festival. French director Ugo Bienvenu's animated feature, which has been described as 'France's answer to Studio Ghibli', is about a boy who uses rainbows to travel through time and his adventures as he gets stuck in the wrong era. There's chatter the movie could feature in the awards race. More from Deadline 'Imago' Director Déni Oumar Pitsaev On Winning Two Prizes In Cannes: "I Didn't Expect It At All" Foul Play Suspected In Cannes Power Outage With Electricity Pylons Sabotaged Cannes Power Restored; Festival Closing Ceremony To Go Ahead As Planned In Wake Of Five-Hour Power Outage In South Of France Oscar winner Portman is also producing with Sophie Mas under their joint Paris and New York banner MountainA with Félix de Givry at Paris-based Remembers. The movie debuted as a special screening in Cannes. It's another win for Neon, which has been voracious once again at Cannes, also acquiring The Secret Agent, It Was Just An Accident and Sirat, in addition to Sentimental Value, which they already had. Taking its cue from the fantasy premise that rainbows are time machines, the movie revolves around 10 year old rainbow-child Arco, who lives in the distant future, 2932. His maiden journey in his multi-colored suit does not go to plan. He loses control and veers off course to land in a near future, 2075, where Iris, a girl the same age as Arco, witnesses his fall and then makes it her mission to get him home. Arco is the first feature for Bienvenu after short films Maman and L'entretien and comic books. His multi-awarded best seller System Preference has been translated in over 10 languages and was released by Penguin in the US, England, and Canada at the end of 2023. Bienvenu, who studied and now teaches at France's famed Gobelins animation school in Paris, has built his production team from talent he trained and nurtured there. Portman will be among the English-language voice cast. The French language voice cast will feature Alma Jodorowsky (Blue Is The Warmest Colour), Swann Arlaud (Anatomy of a Fall), Vincent Macaigne (C'est La Vie, Suspended Time) and Louis Garrel (Little Women, The Dreamers) and rapper Oxmo Puccino. Exec producers are Jamil Shamasdin, alongside Bill Way and Elliott Whitton for Fit Via Vi, and Douglas Choi and Martina Bassenger for Sons of Rigor. Arco marks the first feature animation for Portman and Mas' MountainA since its launch in 2020. The company made its festival debut at Cannes 2023 with Todd Haynes' May December. Goodfellas and CAA Media Finance are repping rights. Best of Deadline 'Poker Face' Season 2 Guest Stars: From Katie Holmes To Simon Hellberg Everything We Know About Amazon's 'Verity' Movie So Far Everything We Know About 'The Testaments,' Sequel Series To 'The Handmaid's Tale' So Far
Time of India
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Cannes 2025: 'It Was Just an Accident' wins sixth Palme d'Or; check full list of winners here
The 2025 Cannes Film Festival has come to an end, turning attention away from the red carpet glitz and onto the compelling stories that moved audiences and juries throughout the event. This year's edition showcased a powerful selection of films poised to leave a lasting impact on global cinema. Topping the list of honours, It Was Just an Accident claimed the prestigious Palme d'Or, earning Neon its sixth consecutive win. Here's a look at the full list of winners. The jury behind the coveted Palme d'Or The main competition jury was led by European Film Academy president Juliette Binoche, supported by an international panel that included Halle Berry, Payal Kapadia, Hong Sang-soo, Jeremy Strong, Dieudo Hamadi, Carlos Reygadas, Leïla Slimani, and Alba Rohrwacher. Cannes Film Festival 2025: Full winners list Palme d'Or: It Was Just an Accident Grand Prix: Sentimental Value Jury Prize: TIE – Sirât & Sound of Falling Best Actress: Nadia Melliti – The Little Sister Best Actor: Wagner Moura – The Secret Agent Best Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho – The Secret Agent Best Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne – The Young Mother's Home Camera d'Or (Best First Feature): Hasan Hadi – The President's Cake Special Award: Bi Gan – Resurrection Short Film Palme d'Or: I'm Glad You're Dead Now – Tawfeek Barhom Short Film Special Mention: Ali – Adnan Al Rajeev Golden Eye Prize: Imago – Déni Oumar Pitsaev Golden Eye 10th Anniversary Special Award: The Six Billion Dollar Man Queer Palm Award: Hafsia Herzi – La Petite Dernière
