South Korean actor and director shine at Cannes Film Festival
- Park Chan-wook clinched the best director award for Decision To Leave while Song Kang-ho picked up the best actor gong for Broker
- Ruben Ostlund’s social satire Triangle of Sadness won the Palme d’Or, handing Ostlund one of cinema’s most prestigious prizes for a second time
The South Korean cinema industry added to a global winning streak on Saturday by scooping two key prizes at the 75th Cannes Film Festival for a pair of beloved veterans.
Ruben Ostlund’s social satire Triangle of Sadness won the Palme d’Or, handing Ostlund one of cinema’s most prestigious prizes for a second time.
Best actress went to Zar Amir Ebrahimi for her performance as a journalist in Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, a true-crime thriller about a serial killer targeting sex workers in the Iranian religious city of Mashhad. Violent and graphic, Holy Spider was not permitted to shoot in Iran and instead was made in Jordan.
Accepting the award, Ebrahimi said the film depicts “everything that’s impossible to show in Iran.”
Park’s Cannes entry came nearly two decades after his Oldboy, which won the festival’s second-highest prize in 2004.
That mind-bending shocker helped catapult South Korean cinema on to the global stage – years before Parasite, which won the 2019 Palme d’Or and best picture at the 2020 Academy Awards.