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Japan's 'Shoplifters' Takes Palme d'Or at Cannes


Director Hirokazu Kore-eda bows to the audience after winning the Palme d'Or for the film "Shoplifters" during the closing ceremony of the 71st international film festival, Cannes, southern France, May 19, 2018.
Director Hirokazu Kore-eda bows to the audience after winning the Palme d'Or for the film "Shoplifters" during the closing ceremony of the 71st international film festival, Cannes, southern France, May 19, 2018.

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda won the Palme d'Or at Cannes on Saturday for Shoplifters, a critically acclaimed family drama with
unguessable plot twists.

The award, to a director who has won prizes at the festival before, defied speculation that the Palme might go to a female director, with three strong contenders in a year when the Hollywood sex scandal was the talk of the town.

Italian actress Asia Argento, who has accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, said there were abusers in the audience who had yet to be outed.

Argento said Weinstein raped her during the Cannes festival in 1997 when she was 21. "This festival was his hunting ground," Argento said in a speech ahead of the prize announcements.

Weinstein has denied allegations of non-consensual sex. A spokesman for Weinstein had no immediate comment. Argento's London-based agent, Steve Kenis, was not immediately available to provide further details.

"Even tonight, sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women," Argento told the black-tie ceremony. "You know who you are, but, most importantly, we know who
you are, and we are not going to allow you to get away with it any longer."

Actress Cate Blanchett speaks during the closing ceremony of the 71st international film festival, Cannes, southern France, May 19, 2018.
Actress Cate Blanchett speaks during the closing ceremony of the 71st international film festival, Cannes, southern France, May 19, 2018.

After the ceremony, Cate Blanchett, who headed the jury of five women and four men, said: "Women and men alike on the jury would love to see more female directorial voices represented," adding that it had been "bloody hard" to select a winner.

'Bowled over'

"But in the end I think we were completely bowled over by how intermeshed the performances were with the directorial vision," she said of Shoplifters.

The runner-up prize, the Grand Prix, went to Spike Lee's satire BlacKkKlansman, based on the true story of a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.

Director Spike Lee speaks after winning the Grand Prix award for the film "BlacKkKlansman" during the closing ceremony of the 71st international film festival, Cannes, southern France, May 19, 2018.
Director Spike Lee speaks after winning the Grand Prix award for the film "BlacKkKlansman" during the closing ceremony of the 71st international film festival, Cannes, southern France, May 19, 2018.

Blanchett said the film's ending, with footage of the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August and President Donald Trump blaming "both sides" for the deadly violence, "blew us out of the cinema."

A female director, Nadine Labaki from Lebanon, won the Jury Prize — effectively, the bronze medal — for Capharnaum, a realist drama about childhood neglect in the slums of Beirut.

Fifty years after he helped get the Cannes festival canceled in 1968 in solidarity with worker-student protests, 87-year-old Jean-Luc Godard received a Special Palme d'Or for his collage of sounds and images, The Image Book.

Poland's Pawel Pawlikowski won Best Director for Cold War, a romance that moves from the peasant farms of Poland to Paris jazz clubs and back from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Girl, a Belgian drama about a transgender teenage girl's quest to become a ballerina, won the Camera d'Or for the best directorial debut for director Lukas Dhont.

Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director who is prevented from leaving Iran and is in theory banned from making films, won Best Screenplay for 3 Faces along with co-writer Nader Saeivar.

The award was given jointly to another film, Happy as Lazzaro, written and directed by Italian Alice Rohrwacher.

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    Reuters

    Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.

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