Directed by Mike Leigh • 1996 • United Kingdom
Mike Leigh’s Palme d’Or–winning masterpiece charts the shockwaves that ripple through an already-fractured London family when Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a successful, adopted black optometrist, makes contact with Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, winner of the best actress prize at Cannes), her desperately dysfunctional white birth mother, who is woefully unprepared to deal with the situation. With unexpected humor and gripping emotional realism, Leigh crafts an intricate, richly human exploration of the buried tensions and heartaches that run beneath the surface of family life.
Up Next in Palme d’Or Winners
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Taste of Cherry
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1997 • Iran
Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry is an emotionally complex meditation on life and death. Middle-aged Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives through the hilly outskirts of Tehran, s...
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Dheepan
Directed by Jacques Audiard • 2015 • France
Starring Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine VinasithambyWith this Palme d’Or–winning drama, which deftly combines seemingly disparate genres, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard cemented his status as a titan of contemporary world ...
