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 When the veteran director Ken Loach found himself shortlisted for the Palme d’Or trophy for an eighth time this week, he proclaimed it a greater honour than the Oscars. Loach said that Cannes, the world’s leading showcase for international cinema, was not only the premier film festival, but that its choice of films was not dictated by the intense lobbying of Oscar recognition.
There was, Loach said, something “obscene” about the fortunes spent by film companies to get the American academy to notice their film and he called for an end to such lobbying.
The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Loach’s Irish civil war epic starring Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delaney, will have its world premiere at Cannes before opening across Britain and Ireland on June 23.
It is one of three British films on the nineteen-strong shortlist announced yesterday for the festival, which runs from May 17 to 28. Set in Ireland in the 1920s, it tells the story of two brothers who fought together in the Irish War of Independence but on opposite sides in the civil war that ensued.
Loach, who has become a darling of Cannes with films such as Land and Freedom, about the Spanish Civil War, but who has not won an Oscar, said that it was a “pivotal” chapter in history that was relatively little- known in Britain, yet its consequences were still felt.
The UK Film Council was particularly pleased with the film’s inclusion, having given £545,000 of national lottery money to the project. It also backed, with £447,100, another shortlisted British film, Red Road, which stars Natalie Press in a story of obsession and forgiveness. It marks the feature debut of its British director, Andrea Arnold, who was described yesterday by David Thompson, head of BBC Films and a co-producer, as a “film-maker of incredible vision”.
The adaptation of Dan Brown’s thriller The Da Vinci Code will open the festival, but is not in competition.
Jeremy Thomas, a British producer whose films include The Last Emperor, will be flying the flag with BBC Films coproduction, Fast Food Nation, a satirical work directed by Richard Linklater. Paul Trijbits, the head of the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund, said: “It confirms that British film talent continues to produce films that excite the most prestigious film festival in the world.”
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