This Wednesday, the Louis-Delluc 2022 prize was awarded ex aequo to the films Saint Omer by Alice Diop and Pacifiction by Albert Serra. “Two magnificent films”, according to the declaration of Sophie Avon, general secretary of the prize, who “had the preferences of the jury” yes ok «[qu’]at the time of the vote, it was impossible to decide between them”.
Nicknamed the “Goncourt of cinema”, the Louis-Delluc prize is awarded annually by a college of critics under the chairmanship of Gilles Jacob. Twice awarded at the Venice Film Festival and already winner of the 2022 Jean-Vigo Prize, Saint Omer is the first fiction feature by filmmaker Alice Diop, after fifteen years of documentary practice. In this trial film, a young novelist attends the trial of Laurence Coly, a Senegalese immigrant accused of the murder of her 15-month-old child, inspired by the Fabienne Kabou case, in 2013.
Presented in competition at the last Cannes Film Festival, where it was not rewarded in the prize list, Peace, torment on the islands du Catalan Albert Serra (The Death of Louis XIV, Freedom…) follows the paranoid drift of a French notable (Benoît Magimel) stationed in Tahiti, confronted with the rumor of the resumption of nuclear tests, in a languid and hallucinated atmosphere. Currently in theaters, the two winning films are distributed by Les films du Losange.
The prize for best first film was awarded to Charlotte Le Bon for Falcon Lake, a fantastic teen movie set against a backdrop of love and ghost stories, chronicling the summer of two teenagers by a lake. In theaters Wednesday, December 7.