Loach Irish Film Wins Cannes Big Prize
Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes The Barley, the film about the Irish War of Independence and following Irish Civil War, has won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’Or.
See: US Release of Barley
Previously nominated seven times for the Palm d’Or, British director Ken Loach has won with what he describes as ‘a very little step in the British confronting their imperialist history‘. It is for the likes of this that I have maintained Loach is heroic when it comes to making movies.
Focusing on the smaller details rather than, for example, who shot Michael Collins, Loach continues to ground his films in the social realism he has used since before even the fabulous Kes. Reviews on The Wind That Shakes The Barley all have it as even less of a sweeping epic than Loach’s excellent Spanish Civil War movie, Land And Freedom
Friend of Kansas City, our Fuchsia Band Man Mairtin from Cork of course had a small part in The Wind That Shakes the Barley with Loach as ever largely favouring relative unknowns. Cillian Murphy is the biggest name in TWTSTB.
The two favourites were Almodovar’s Volver, and Inarritu’s Babel, which won best screenplay and best director respectively, but the Cannes Film Festival jury has a history of not matching critics’ predictions.
As the Cannes Grand Prize winner, will The Wind That Shakes The Barley really not be shown in North America? UPDATE: see American Release details for The Wind That Shakes The Barley
See Also:
• Ken Loach: Movie Making Hero
• Articles on The Wind That Shakes The Barley
• The BBC Shakes The Barley
• Cillian Murphy is not Irish Actor
• The Irish Gay Icon Who Shot Michael Collins
• US Irish Film Office, Cannes, and The Tudors
• Irish Tax Movie Breaks Approved by EC
• Magical Movie Music Moment
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
It certainly wasn’t on my radar that this film would win.
–RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com
It did seem to be consistently received across the board, and highly regarded though both volver and especially Babel seemed to create a bigger wow.
Moretti’s film got a very mixed reaction, and Linklater’s and Coppola’s didn’t go down too well so overall The Wind That Shakes The Barley was always in with a chance in a likely three-horse race
In the offical press conference at Cannes for TWTSTB Ken Loach himself said he wants the file to be released in North America. He didn’t say what, if anything, might be standing in the way and now that it is, in fact, the TOP film at Cannes it would be very, very strange if there wasn’t SOME kind of release over here. It would take some pretty strange forces at work at this point to actually stop it from playing here.
Does everyone realize that Mairtin actually ’sings’ in the film? It wasn’t scripted but when Ken Loach heard Mairtin singing on the set they worked a scene into the movie
where his character “Sean” sings something. Congratulations to everyone involved with TWTSTB!