CanWest News Service, Canada
May 24 2008

Atom Egoyan movie wins prize for its spiritual values

Jay Stone , CanWest News Service

CANNES, France — Adoration, a film by Canadian director Atom Egoyan,
has won the ecumenical jury prize — the award given for movies that
celebrate spiritual values — at the Cannes Film Festival.

Adoration, which is about a teenage boy who re-creates his own
identity on the Internet, "invites us to re-evaluate existing cliches
about the Other or that which is foreign in our own culture and
religion," the jury said.

An emotional Egoyan said he was "overwhelmed" by the choice and also
by the citation, which he called beautifully worded. "The jury got the
movie," he said after the ceremony.

Photo: RED CARPET: Director Atom Egoyan and actress Rachel Blanchard
arrive Thursday for the premiere of Adoration at the 61st
International Cannes Film Fes-tival in Cannes, France.

Sean Gallup, Getty Images

Egoyan has won the ecumenical prize before, for his 1997 film The
Sweet Hereafter, but he said he didn’t understand why that movie won
the award. Adoration, on the other hand, "is dealing with all sorts of
belief systems, some of them obviously invented, and it’s dealing with
the nature of how we organize systems of beliefs within families and
cultures and ourselves. So it seems to make a lot more sense."

The director, who lives in Toronto, said his movie is provocative, and
it was a brave choice for the six-member international jury.

Adoration is also in the running for Cannes’ biggest prizes, including
the Palme d’Or, which will be handed out Sunday. Egoyan said his movie
came to Cannes late — it was screened on Thursday, the eighth day of
the festival — and so he has not seen any of the other films in the
running for the Palme. "I can’t make any predictions," he said.

Earlier Saturday, Next Floor, an 11-minute Canadian film about
gluttony, won the festival’s grand prize for short movie.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Next Floor was shot in an abandoned
Montreal factory that was being demolished, and shows a group of
diners eating piles of food — everything from rhinoceros to deer —
before crashing through to the floor below.

Villeneuve, who has also directed Maelstrom, shot Next Floor while
taking a break from editing his new feature Polytechnique, about the
1989 Montreal massacre. The Cannes award is given by the French TV
network Canal+, which acquires the right to broadcast Next
Floor. Villeneuve wins 6,000 Euros (about $9,000) toward equipment for
the shooting of his next film.

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