Un Certain Regard Awards Ceremony Gets Under Way at Cannes Film Festival (Updating Live)

The Cannes Film Festival‘s second-most prestigious competition, Un Certain Regard, is typically dominated by newer, less heralded names in world cinema. But there was more star power than usual at stake in this year’s awards ceremony, as pundits wondered whether one of the three debut features by prominent actors-turned-directors in this year’s lineup — Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson and Harris Dickinson — could land a prize.

As it turned out, people needn’t have worried about a Hollywood takeover. Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water” and Johansson’s “Eleanor the Great” both went unawarded, as the jury threw a relative curveball in handing the Prix Un Certain Regard to Chilean director Diego Céspedes for his alluringly titled first feature “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” an offbeat study of a transgender commune living in the Chilean desert around the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

The film received mixed reviews when it premiered near the beginning of the festival: Variety critic Siddhant Adlakha wrote that it “meanders on occasion, and never quite finds the right rhythm for its more traditional dialogue coverage,” but praised it for “tremendously moving moments that stir the soul by scrutinizing the dueling cruelty and tenderness found within its characters.” The jury, meanwhile, praised it as “raw and powerful and yet funny and wild,” before handing the prize to an astonished Céspedes, who stated tearily that his film “began with all the angry lovers to just wanted to love like everybody else.”

The decision rested with a jury headed by a relative newcomer herself: 31-year-old British writer-director Molly Manning Walker won the top prize in Un Certain Regard two years ago for her vivid debut “How to Have Sex,” and was joined on the panel by filmmakers Louise Courvoisier and Roberto Minervini, actor Nahuel Perez Biscayart and Rotterdam fest director Vanja Kaluđerčić.

The runner-up Jury Prize was presented to another work from Latin America: director Simón Mesa Soto’s raw, discomfiting black comedy “A Poet,” about a sadsack poetry teacher whose attempt to mentor a prodigious working-class teen talent goes farcically wrong. The jury’s statement celebrated the film’s “authenticity and subtle handling of morally questionable characters,” while Mesa Soto’s short speech dedicated his prize to his filmmaking peers in the section and beyond: “To all the people here who are trying to make a film, who are trying to make art. It’s a fucking hard job. This film is about that.”

The longest ovation of the ceremony, however, was for the winners of the Best Director prize: Palestinian twin brothers Tarzan and Arab Nasser for their film “Once Upon a Time in Gaza,” a portrait of two young men resorting to drug peddling to get by on the Gaza Strip in 2007. In a lengthy, overwhelmed speech, the brothers described this day as both “bad and lucky for us,” before relating a recent phone conversation with their mother in Gaza, in which she urged them to travel to Cannes over their reservations about doing so: “You have to go, tell them to stop the genocide.” “We regift this present to every single Palestinian,” they concluded, holding up their award.

Theirs wasn’t the only pro-Palestinian statement of the evening. Accepting a performance prize for her film-stealing work in Portuguese director Pedro Pinho’s 210-minute postcolonial meditation “I Only Rest in the Storm,” Cape Verdean actor Cléo Diara disrupted the flow of her own highly emotive speech with a sudden, impassioned interjection: “If a country is not free, nobody is free,” she stated. “Free Palestine.” Elsewhere in her highly expressive address, she denounced Portugal’s newly elected right-wing government — “Cinema is about people, and we will not give up,” she urged — and offered a shoutout to other Black women in the industry: “All Black girls: don’t let people tell you you can’t do it.”

Those two speeches were hard acts to follow, as another performance prizewinner, soft-spoken British actor Frank Dillane, slyly acknowledged as he took the stage — having been honored for his breakout turn as a homeless addict struggling to break the cycle in Dickinson’s social-realist debut feature “Urchin.”

“This is probably going to be quite boring,” he said sheepishly, to appreciative laughter from the audience. “Nothing worse than an actor without a character, eh?” But he warmed up, offering a dedication to those living in society’s margins as disarmingly sincere as “Urchin” itself. “I hope our film stands in resistant to that impulse to dehumanize,” he said, before stating that he owes his win entirely to Dickinson’s “vision and talent,” and zanily concluding with a quote from the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.”

Whether or not it was down to Manning Walker’s influence, it was a good night for British film, as first-timer Harry Lighton took the Best Screenplay award for his buzzy, A24-backed queer drama “Pillion,” about a dom-sub relationship between bikers played by Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling. Seconding Dillane’s quip by suggesting that “maybe it’s a British thing doing boring speeches,” Lighton honored “the kink community” for granting him “permission to find the comedy in this world, without laughing at its subjects.”

He also thanked his producers for steering him away from a neurotic last-minute impulse to resituate the film in Ancient Rome: “It’s essential to have producers tell me some of my ideas are terrible, with love.” The film’s imminent cult following, already salivating over images of Skarsgard in full biker leathers, likely thank them too.

Full list of winners:

Prix Un Certain Regard: “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” Diego Céspedes

Jury Prize: “A Poet,” Simón Mesa Soto

Best Screenplay: Harry Lighton, “Pillion”

Best Performance: Cléo Diara, “I Only Rest in the Storm” and Frank Dillane, “Urchin”

Best Director: Tarzan and Arab Nasser, “Once Upon a Time in Gaza”