Cannes Winners ‘09: On Stage and Backstage on Closing Night

Jacques Audiard tonight in Cannes. Photo by Eugene Hernandez/indieWIRE

9:26 p.m.—After Brillante Mendoza’s remarks, filmmaker Andrea Arnold, who shared the Prix du Jury with Park Chan Wook, said that she really liked Lars Von Trier’s remarks earlier this week in which he called audiences guests.

“Everyone that comes to see a film is a guest. You are guests and you decide whether you want to be nice guests or bad guests,” Arnold said, pausing, “That’s fine, you can be angry or have feelings about that, reaction is good.”

9:23 p.m.—“I was kind of prepared,” Brillante Mendoza, director of “Kinatay” said, when asked how he handled the divided audience reactions to his film. He said that given the debate he generated with “Serbis” last year, he was ready. And asked whether he was expecting an award, he added, “Did I expect it? Of course, I always expect for the best.”

9:03 p.m.—A journalist just asked the jury to defend their choice of Brillante Mendoza for the best director award, a choice that stirred some boos tonight from critics and writers.

“Because the jury liked it,” juror and filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan said directly, with juror Hanif Kureishi added, “Sometimes good art is hard,” but he qualified, “It’s not something I want to see again, I have to say.”

9:00 p.m.—“Some of [the movies] are very very long,” juror Hanif Kureishi said, stirring laughter in the press room. “And some of them are very weird, I have to say. I saw things that I’ve never seen in my life in these films.”

I have to assume he was referring to Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist”.

8:55 p.m.—“I always loved him as a director,” Isabelle Huppert said tonight of “White Ribbon” director Michael Haneke.

I asked her what it meant to present this award to Haneke eight years after the two of them had such success here in Cannes with “The Piano Teacher.” “My love for his work was in a sense for his humanity,” she continued, “A humanity that takes a strange path, which makes it even more interesting, an even more fascinating [look] into the human soul.”

8:39 p.m.—Press backstage awaiting the arrival of the jury.

Jurors Lee Chang Dong, Isabelle Huppert, Hanif Kureishi, Robin Wright Penn and Nuri Bilge Ceylan tonight in Cannes. Photo by Eugene Hernandez/indieWIRE

8:28 p.m.—Warwick Thornton, winner of the Camera d’Or said, moments ago, “My life has been a Cinderella story.” Talking about his outback story, the first Aboriginal film to play in Cannes, said just now, “Cinema in a sense saves my life.”

“I’ve only just begun,” Thornton added, “I’ve got so many stories to tell. Cannes and the Camera d’Or is the beginning of a cinderalla story. A journey thrugh cinema.”

8:26 p.m.—The winners, on stage in the press room, chatting about how they alerted their friends back home.

8:23 p.m.—Backstage now, the press conference room is filling up as the media await the arrival of the winners of the Camera d’Or.

8:18 p.m.—A big embrace between filmmaker Michael Haneke and jury President Isabelle Huppert, on stage at the Palais. The two famously worked together 8 years ago on “The Piano Teacher” which won three prizes here in Cannes in 2001, the best actress prize for Huppert, best actor for Benoit Magimel and the Grand Prix runner-up award for the film.

8:09 p.m.—Haneke stands, along with the rest of the audience, to applaud Jacques Audiard, who is also wearing dark sunglasses, on his Grand Prix. Does the Palme belong to Haneke?