Director-writer Xavier Dolan's Laurence
Anyways has taken the third annual Queer Palm at the Cannes Film
Festival.
The award recognizes one film playing
at the festival for its contributions to lesbian, gay, bisexual or
transgender issues.
In Dolan's film, Laurence Alia (played
by Melvil Poupaud), an accomplished writer and teacher, tells his
fiancee Fred Belair (Suzanne Clement), who works in the film
industry, that he has always been a woman, even if he was born a man,
and that he's ready to begin transitioning to a woman.
Is their love doomed?
The film is as much about finding
oneself as it is about modern love. (A trailer for the film is
embedded in the right panel of this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)
The feature is the third effort from
23-year-old French-Canadian wunderkind Dolan, whose previous credits
include I Killed My Mother and Heartbeats. It competed
in Cannes' Un Certain Regard sidebar.
“This entire film is candy for the
cinephile and Dolan had me eating out of his hands,” wrote Brad
Brevet in reviewing the motion picture at RopeOfSilicon.com.
Cannes, whose 65th edition
ran for 10 days in a town along the French Riviera, was the largest
European film festival to lack a gay prize before the French
directing team of Oliver Ducastel and Jacques Martineau introduced
the Queer Palm two years ago. The Berlin Film Festival's annual
Teddy Award first debuted in 1987, while the Queer Lion has been
recognizing gay-themed films screened at the Venice Film Festival
since 2007. The Queer Palm is an unofficial prize not connected to
the festival.