Jafar Panahi’s Cannes victory is a wonderful moment for an amazingly courageous film-maker

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Panahi has endured years of harassment from the Iranian authorities but has created a tremendous body of work; his Palme d’Or is richly deserved Iranian director Jafar Panahi wins Palme d’Or at Cannes for It Was Just an Accident In the end, the Cannes Palme d’Or went to the most courageous film director in the world . It was a very satisfying grownup decision, favouring a remarkable and utterly individual film-maker: the director and democracy campaigner Jafar Panahi, an artist who unlike any other director in the Cannes competition really has suffered, taken real risks for cinema and spoken truth to power – and endured arrest and imprisonment for his pains. He has created a rich canon of work which has told the world about Iranian society and the Iranian mind with a subtlety and depth that we are never going to get from the TV news. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/faZuEUS via IFTTT
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Laurent Cantet, film-maker who tackled diversity and class in France, dies aged 63

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Director of Palme d’Or-winning film Entre les Murs (The Class) was much praised for humanism in projects

Laurent Cantet, the award-winning film-maker whose creations tackled some of the most complex issues of modern French society, including meritocracy, the education system, diversity and class struggle, has died aged 63 after an illness.

Cantet was best known outside France for his film Entre les Murs (The Class), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 2008. It depicted life inside the classroom of a secondary school in Paris’s diverse 20th arrondissement and the relationship between students – compellingly improvised by non-professional teenagers – and their at times exasperated teacher.

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