Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s zany romantic drama A Useful Ghost has won the top prize at Cannes Critics’ Week.
The feature, which is the first Thai film to play in the parallel section for a number of years, won the inaugural AMI Paris Grand Prize.
This year’s jury was presided over by Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen (The Beasts, Riot Police, The New Years), who was joined by Oscar-winning Judas and the Black Messiah UK actor Daniel Kaluuya, Moroccan journalist Jihane Bougrine, French-Canadian cinematographer Josée Deshaies and Indonesian producer Yulia Evina Bhara.
A Useful Ghost co-stars top Thai actress, model and influencer Davika Hoorne as Nat, a woman who dies of dust pollution and then returns as a ghost in the form of a vacuum cleaner, determined to save her family from a similar fate.
The feature, which is the first Thai film to play in the parallel section for a number of years, won the inaugural AMI Paris Grand Prize.
The movie co-stars top Thai actress, model and influencer Davika Hoorne as Nat, a woman who dies of dust pollution and then returns as a ghost in the form of a vacuum cleaner, determined to save her family from a similar fate.
Witsarut Himmarat plays her husband March, whose wealthy manufacturing family reject this unconventional human-ghost relationship.
In other prizes, the French Touch Prize of the Jury went to France-based Chechen director Deni Oumar Pitsaev’s Imag
The autobiographical documentary explores the director’s plans to build a futuristically designed house at odds with the landscape and local traditions on a small plot of land in a Georgian valley at the foot of the Caucasus, on the border of Chechnya.
Quebecois actor Théodore Pellerin won the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award for his performance in Pauline Loquès’s Nino, about a young drifter, who spends three days wandering the streets after losing the keys to his apartment.
Leitz Cine Discovery Prize for short film was won by Randa Maroufi’s L’mina, about an unofficial coal mining town in Morocco.
In collateral prizes, Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl won the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution, which will support the French release of the film by Le Pacte.
The SACD Award for best screenplay went to director Guillermo Galoe and Victor Alonso-Berbel for Sleepless City, on which they took co-writing credits.
The Canal+ Award for short film went to Erogenesis de by Xandra Popescu
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