Greek win at Cannes
CANNES (AFP) – A darkly surreal Greek family yarn was named best film in Cannes’s new talent section on Saturday, with honors also going to a Romanian cop story and a tribute to Iran’s underground music scene. «Dogtooth» (Kynodontas) by Greece’s Giorgos Lanthimos, won the top prize of the festival’s official Un Certain Regard section, which groups original movies, and this year offered 20 works from across the globe. Lanthimos’s second film tells the story of a couple who for years keep their three children cut off from the world, behind the high walls of their suburban villa, in a disturbing parable on the dysfunctional workings of dictatorship. In a storyline built around lies and manipulation, the children are told that they will be allowed to leave the house the day their adult canines – the «dogteeth» of the title – fall out, which, of course, will never happen. The Jury Prize went to Corneliu Porumboiu for «Police, Adjective,» about the ethical dilemmas facing a Romanian cop as he tracks a small-time teenage drug dealer. And Iran’s Bahman Ghobadi received a special prize from the jury chaired by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino for «Nobody Knows About The Persian Cats,» a docu-fiction that pays tribute to Tehran’s underground rap and rock scene. Ghobadi’s warmly received film tells the story of two young Iranians who put together a band and travel to play in European festivals after being released from a stint in jail.
