CANNES (voa) – A movie about high school violence in the United States has won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Judges awarded the Golden Palm prize to the film “Elephant” and its American director, Gus Van Sant. He was also named best director at the festival.
The fictional movie begins with an ordinary day at a high school in America. But the day turns tragic when two students go on a shooting spree that kills many other students.
Second-place or Grand Prize, went to a Turkish film called “Distant.” It is about a jobless man from the countryside who irritates his sophisticated city cousin by moving into his apartment.
Two men who starred in the film, Musaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak, shared the award for best actor.
Marie-Josee Croze won the best actress award for her performance in a Canadian film called “The Barbarian Invasions,” which won a prize for best screenplay.
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Elephant: Using a cast of mostly unknown actors from Portland, Oregon, Gus Van Sant explores the subject of high-school violence, pondering the long-lost era of innocence as well as the hard-line desperation and madness of two cold-blooded killers. Time has come to speak out. |
For the presentation of Elephant, director Gus Van Sant, actors Elias McConnell, Alex Frost and John Robinson, director of photography Harris Savides, producers Dany Wolf and Bill Robinson, and Colin Calender, president of HBO Films, made it to Cannes to tell the tale.
– Filmmaker Gus Van Sant, on the birth of his project: “The one film that I wrote by myself, without any other material as a source, was My Own Private Idaho in 1991. Ever since that film, I had sort of avoided doing original pieces. It was a long time… I was sort of planning different things. It wasn’t until Gerry and Elephant that I kind of went back to original material. (…) The origins of the project were way back when Columbine happened. There was a desire that I had to go and make a television movie, something that would be on mainstream, like ABC, CBS and NBC in America, that dealt with the characters that I thought were in the story of the original event. And, I pitched around town and nobody really had the ability to do it because it was such an upswell of concern and perhaps even sanctions against violence on television. So, nobody could actually entertain the idea, except when I met Colin Calender who said that he couldn’t do Columbine, but he could do Elephant.”
– Colin Calender: “It is true that we live in a world of twenty-four-hour news, with a constant bombardment of images and sounds bites, that have made it increasingly difficult to decipher and understand the context and the deeper meaning behind so much of the imagery that assaults us on a daily basis. So, it is true that we look towards some of our filmmaking as a way of providing context, exploring more profoundly some of the issues of the day. When Gus first brought us this idea with Bill, it’s not that we couldn’t do Columbine. But, in the end, I felt that simply doing Columbine as a sort of drama-documentary wasn’t necessarily going to result in exploring anymore deeply the events that had taken place. Gus is such an extraordinary filmmaker, there was maybe something more exploratory and less steeped in the literalness of the events of Columbine that he could explore through a fictional approach.”
– Gus Van Sant, on the issue of violence: “We tried to not really specifically explain such a horrific event. I wanted to include the audience’s thoughts into how such a thing would take place. I do have my own ideas on why something like Columbine happened, but some of those things aren’t really in the film. I was really trying to get at more of a poetic impression, and sort of allow the audience’s thoughts into that impression and dictate an answer or a reason.”
– The three high-school students, on the impact of Columbine:
John Robinson: “Columbine was of course a big tragedy and it definitely impacted all kids in America. For us to go into making a movie about that really put pressure on us to be spokesmen for kids of America. But it definitely changed the way we looked at school.”
Alex Frost: “It definitely changed the way we acted around our friends and around school.”
Elias McConnell: “I’m home-schooled, so I didn’t have to get affected really. But, it changed my view of high school a lot. It kind of scared me and made me happy that I didn’t go to high school. I couldn’t really understand how someone could get to that point – of doing something like that.”
– Van Sant, on Michael Moore’s documentary on Columbine: “We watched Bowling for Columbine before we made our film. It’s brilliant. I’m a big Michael Moore fan and I think that it’s really great that we have him.”
– Colin Calender, on arms sales: “It’s certainly more complex than the film portrays and frankly that was intentional, because the notion of actually, on film, going through in an explicit way as to how kids could order guns over the Internet would have been utterly irresponsible. Although, of course, kids do get access to guns.”
– Gus Van Sant, on violence in the United States: “Within that film, I think Matt Stone pinpointed a very central problem, which was that of two kids – who were very smart kids – who lost their sense of a future of any kind to the point where they were turning inward and destroying themselves, and along the way, decided to take as many with them as they could.”
