A few days before Jacques Audiard’s highly regarded, “Un Prophete” won the Grand Prix (runner-up) prize at the 62 annual Cannes Film Festival, the film’s U.S. rights were bought by Sony Pictures Classics, who did probably the most film purchasing of any distributor during the festival (they also bought the Palme d’Or winner, Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon”). No word on when the film will hit U.S. theaters, but presumably Fall 2009, so the picture can qualify for the Foreign Academy Awards (France likely to nominate it and put their best foot forward).
Before the prizes were awarded yesterday in France, Audiard’s film was the most talked-about picture and was tapped to win the main Palme prize, but the less-discussed Haneke film still managed to score the top prize.
“Un Prophete” (“A Prophet”) is a prison drama about a young, illiterate Arab man sent to a French prison where he becomes a mafia kingpin. And people raved about it the entire festival.
“For sheer muscle and sweat, nothing has so far beaten Jacques Audiard’s terrific prison-gangster movie, A Prophet,” The Guardian’s wrote midway through the festival. “Which calls to mind old-fashioned French thrillers by Jean-Pierre Melville. The film shows Audiard to be the biggest beast in new French cinema.”
Good news for us because we sadly missed in in Cannes (of all the pictures, we’re going to miss, right? Ugh, we know). Though mostly unknown outside France, modern cinephiles know Audiard, among other works, for his solid 2005 French-language picture, “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” itself a remake of James Toback’s 1978 debut feature, “Fingers” starring Harvey Keitel.
Audiard is planning to turn Canadian Craig Davidson’s short-story collection “Rust and Bone” into his next film according to the Globe & Mail.