As the Directors’ Fortnight explains on its site, it’s not a competitive program and doesn’t usually present awards itself, “but some of our sponsors present awards that are announced at the closing ceremony.”
Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant‘s won the Europa Cinemas Label Award, presented by the organization founded ten years ago to promote selected films in its network of theaters. In other words, for those who live on the continent, chances of seeing Barnard’s first fiction feature have just been upped.
The Art Cinema Award, presented by the International Confederation of Art Cinemas, goes to Guillaume Gallienne’s Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table! (Me Myself and Mum), which also wins the Prix SACD, presented by the Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques, honoring a French-language feature. Special mention: Serge Bozon’s Tip Top.
João Nicolau’s Gambozinos (A Wild Goose Chase) has won the prize for best short film, the Prix Illy du court métrage. Special mention: André Novais Oliveira’s Pouco mais de um mês (About a Month).
Updates: In Screen, Jonathan Romney calls Me Myself and Mum “a cheerful and inventive comic confessional about Gallienne’s upbringing, his relations with his mother, and his eventual embracing of his inner heterosexual after growing up as a female-identified boy whom everyone assumes is gay. Based on Galienne’s successful solo stage show, the film plays up its theatrical origins only to transcend them in sometimes dizzily flamboyant coups de cinéma, with Gallienne playing a genial master (and sometimes mistress) of ceremonies throughout.”
“The 41-year-old Gallienne plays himself from school-age child to awkward adolescent to young man,” notes Stephen Dalton in the Hollywood Reporter. “He also doubles up in drag to play his own mother, looking uncannily like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, often acting opposite himself in smoothly blended split-screen scenes. An unshakable presence in his psyche, Mommy Dearest materializes to advise the timid hero at key moments, whether he is receiving a life-changing enema from Diane Kruger’s stern German health-spa nurse or unwittingly signing up for a group-sex orgy at a bacchanalian gay nightclub.”
At Cineuropa, Fabien Lermercier, too, admires this adaptation with its “great cinematographic creativity, devastating humour and a moving tone.”
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