The 2013 Un Certain Regard prizes were handed out by Thomas Vinterberg’s jury this evening in Cannes. Cambodian director Rithy Panh won the top award for his first-person story The Missing Picture. The Jury Prize was given to the well-liked Omar by Oscar nominee Hany Abu-Assad. Alain Guiraudie won the Directing Prize for the controversial but acclaimed erotic thriller Stranger By The Lake which Strand Releasing picked up this week. The Un Certain Talent award was given to the ensemble of actors from Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez’ The Golden Cage. And Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station was honored with the Prize of the Future. His film, which won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award in Sundance, held a berth in UCR that’s usually reserved for movies that made a name in Park City. Eventual Oscar nominee Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts Of The Southern Wild ran in UCR last year.
Commenting on the selection, Vinterberg noted, “One of the finest achievements in filmmaking is to create unforgettable moments – moments that stay with us – as a collective memory – as a collective mirror of our existence. Clay figures, extreme beauty, violence, homosexual blow jobs, systematic humiliation of the human kind, Léa Seydoux’s legs, great Brando imitations are just some of the unique images that will follow us for a while. This selection was insistingly unsentimental, and still poetic. It was political, highly original, sometimes disturbing, diverse and first of all, very often – unforgettable.”