Cannes 2023: Uncertain vision winners on colonial history, abandoned youth and global poverty

After ten days of competitive and twenty feature films, presented, analyzed and discussed by critics, the jury of the parallel section “Un certain regard” under the leadership of American actor John Reilly announced the prize list. on Friday, May 26, at the traditional closing night. A list of awards that more or less reflects the three main themes that this year’s selected films have covered: the exhumation of different countries of their colonial history; Bringing out the abandoned youth, left to itself, doomed to wandering and abandonment; and global impoverishment, which results in even more violence.

The Uncertain Regard prize has been moved How to have sexfirst A feature film by British Molly Manning Walker, 29, in which three teenage girls indulge in an enchanted break (they believe) at a seaside resort in Crete. In the program: alcohol, drugs and excessive sex, sleepless nights and gloomy ideas quickly banished by artificial paradises, all-encompassing meetings aimed at immediate gratification, unrestrained hedonism to the point of dizziness and even loss of desire. Because there’s a lot more at stake here than the nonsense you want to believe. The question of consent is, among other things, the first order that man obeys and, ultimately, the frustration that results from it.

Dream-like visions

Among the feature films presented in this forty-fifth edition, Augur, Rapper and performer Baloji received the New Voice Award. Blending realism, spiritualism and dreamlike visions, this multifaceted first film follows the return of Kofi (Mark Zinga) to the Congo after a fifteen-year absence, who has come to meet his wife’s (European, pregnant with twins) parents. The latter was separated from his origin, his mother, who banished him, the district of Lubumbashi, which always considered him a witch. A chaotic reunion with the family will lead to an encounter with three other characters at odds with their environment. Four voices, four presences multiplying points of view, finally developing a kind of evocative labyrinth of animist culture, which the assistant director transfers in all complexity, to his own artistic, musical, poetic and pictorial world.

New for this 2023 edition, the ensemble prize was crowned Burit flower, Portuguese João Salavisa and Brazilian Rene Nader Mesora. A journey through time and the preserved space of Tocantin State, Northeast Brazil, with the Craho people. The community has been threatened for centuries, fighting to preserve their land, adapting their rituals and practices without ever denying their connection to nature. A link that the film-making duo recreates through a slow-paced plot based on natural cycles, daily tasks and gestures, ancestral rituals.