Xavier Dolan, 21, won the Prix de Jeunesse at the Cannes International Film Festival on Saturday.Andreas Rentz
Twenty-one year old Canadian director Xavier Dolan won the Regards Jeunes prize at this year's Cannes international film festival. The prize was given on Saturday afternoon for his film, Heartbeats, which was in the Un Certain Regard sidebar of this year's Official Selection.
It is the second year in a row that Dolan has won the same prize. At last year's festival, he took the Regards Jeunes, along with two other prizes for his Directors' Fortnight entry, J'ai Tué Ma Mère (I Killed My Mother). The prize is selected by a jury of seven young cinephiles for a director's first or second film.
In other prizes that were handed out before Sunday night's Palme d'Or ceremony, Korean director Hang Song-soo's film, Ha Ha Ha, took the Un Certain Regard Prize.
The jury, led by Belgian director Claire Denis, also gave jury prizes to Peruvian brother directors, Daniel and Diego Vega, for October, a drama about a loan shark who finds himself caring for an infant. In addition, the jury gave a performance prize to three actresses: Adela Sanchez, Eva Bianco and Victoria Raposo, who starrred in from Ivan Fund and Santiago Loza's Los Labios (Lips) about women welfare workers in Argentina.
Director Mathieu Amalric's On Tour, starring Amalric as a French manager of an American burlesque troupe, took the FIPRESCI prize, awarded by the International Federation of the Cinematographic Press.
The Ecumenical Prize for promoting religious understanding went to French director Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men, the true-life story of a group of Catholic monks working in a mountain village in Algiers the mid-nineties, who were confronted by Islamist militants.
Liam Lacey