2025 Critics’ Week Awards

On Wednesday, A Useful Ghost won the Grand Prize at Critics’ Week in Cannes. Talking to Boonbunchachoke for Filmmaker, Lauren Wissot calls the film “a multilayered cinematic extravaganza (and feat) that manages to seamlessly combine several deep themes: toxic pollution, soulless capitalism, the perils of prioritizing self-interest over the good of the community, and the beauty of unconventional romantic relationships.” That’s a lot, but the film “also takes on Thailand’s bloody colonial and postcolonial history (as well as the erasing of that history) while leaving ample running time for a knock-down-drag-out fight between haunted household appliances.”

The story is inspired by the legend of Mae Nak, the spirit of a deceased woman whose love for her husband drives to return to him. Her story has been told in more than fifty Thai films and television productions, and in Banjong Pisanthanakun’s Pee Mak (2013), the highest-grossing Thai movie of all time, Mae Nak is played by Davika Hoorne. In A Useful Ghost, Hoorne plays a wife reincarnated as a vacuum cleaner, and yes, Boonbunchachoke tells Kong Rithdee in the Bangkok Post, the casting was intentional. Besides, “it’s just kooky  . . . I wanted a film that was ‘silly and serious.’ I also wanted something ‘elegantly perverse.’”

This year’s Critics’ Week jury—filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen (president), film critic Jihane Bougrine, cinematographer Josée Deshaies, producer Yulia Evina Bhara, and actor Daniel Kaluuya—has presented the French Touch Prize of the Jury to Imago, the first feature from Déni Oumar Pitsaev, a filmmaker born in Chechnya who has been living and working in Paris and Brussels. Perhaps hoping to lure him back home, Pitsaev’s mother has given him a patch of land in Pankisi, a valley in Georgia where Chechen refugees fleeing their autonomous republic’s conflicts with Russia have settled.

Cowritten with Mathilde Trichet, Imago is Pitsaev’s chronicle of his trip to Pankisi, where he’s thinking about building his dream house. “An exiled person making a film about an exiled people, Pitsaev films the Pankisi community, everyone from twentysomething soccer players to a group of mixed-age village women, with palpable compassion and curiosity,” writes Vikram Murthi at IndieWire.

The Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award goes to Théodore Pellerin for his lead performance in Nino, the debut feature from Pauline Loquès. On the verge of turning twenty-nine, Nino is diagnosed with a serious but treatable form of cancer. It’s Friday. His treatments will begin on Monday.

“Pellerin’s performance could make or break the film, and he carries it,” writes Alex Heeney at Seventh Row. He “gave one of the best performances of the decade in Philippe Lesage’s Genesis (2018),” and he “does excellent work in Nino, in a way that’s only possible because Loquès lets his performance breathe. She gives us time to watch him process things, think, shake things off, and put up armor to conceal his true feelings.”

The Gan Foundation for Cinema has given its Award for Distribution to Le Pacte for backing Left-Handed Girl, the solo directorial debut of Shih-Ching Tsou, who cowrote and codirected Sean Baker’s Take Out (2004) before producing Baker’s Starlet (2012), Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017), and Red Rocket (2021). Baker has cowritten and edited Left-Handed Girl, which Jessica Kiang, writing for Variety, calls “an assured and lovely portrait of difficult motherhood and painful daughterhood, but it’s perhaps most entrancing for its turning-kaleidoscope-view of the director’s native city, where the characters are the bouncing beads, but Taipei is the glitter and the dazzle.”

The SACD Award presented by the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers goes to Victor Alonso-Berbel and director Guillermo Galoe for writing Sleepless City, the story of Toni, a fifteen-year-old growing up in Europe’s largest illegal slum. “Sleepless City is the real deal,” writes Adam Solomons at IndieWire. “It helps that it was shot in Cañada Real, a real-life Roma-ruled shantytown on the outskirts of Madrid best known in the city for a notorious ‘drug supermarket,’ and living conditions that are thought to be among the very worst in Europe.” Solomons admires “the confidence and maturity with which [Galoe] tells a thorny, ethically challenging story.”

Xandra Popescu’s fourth short film, Erogenesis, has won the Canal+ Award. With cowriter and producer Clara Puhlmann, Popescu conjures a world in which, following some mysterious disaster, humankind can no longer reproduce—until five women dream up a way to create human life outside the body. “In the 1970s,” says Popescu, “there was a boom of women writing science fiction, many of them dreaming up islands of women, autonomous zones where women lived apart from men. We wanted to write from that lineage.”