Cannes’ Top Doc Prize Goes To ‘Ernest Cole’ And’The Brink Of Dreams’

For the second 12 months in a row, the L’Oeil d’or prize – the highest award for documentary on the Cannes Film Festival – is being shared by two movies.

The award introduced on the Croisette at the moment went to Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck, and The Brink of Dreams, directed by Ayman El Amir and Nada Riyadh.

Peck’s movie facilities on the titular South African photographer who documented life below apartheid for his nation’s oppressed Black inhabitants. Actor LaKeith Stanfield voices writings from the late artist within the movie. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found premiered within the Special Screenings part of Cannes.

The L’Oeil d’or jury – comprised of president Nicolas Philibert, in addition to Dyana Gaye, Elise Jalladeau, Francis Legault and Mina Kavani – wrote, “A film that follows the journey of a young South African photographer during the apartheid era. In 1967, at the age of 27, Ernest Cole published a book on the horrors of his country’s regime, the publication of which forced him into exile in the United States and Europe, never to return to his native country. Based on a few testimonies, but even more on the artist’s own words and the extraordinary photographic work recently rediscovered in a Swedish bank, the director tells the story of the wanderings of this fragile, rebellious artist, the loneliness and despair that slowly consumed him to the point where he gradually gave up photography. This tragic destiny, using Ernest Cole’s own words and pictures, deeply moved us.”

The Brink of Dreams (Les Filles du Nil), a movie set within the administrators’ native Egypt, premiered within the Critics Week sidebar to Cannes. The jury wrote, “The second takes us to a Coptic village in southern Egypt, in the footsteps of a small group of girls who rebel by forming a street theater troupe. Dreaming of becoming actresses, dancers or singers, they try to find their place, defying their families and the patriarchal traditions of their country. A film both simple and luminous, that could almost look like ‘a walk in the park,’ but instead shows us the complexity of their struggle to conquer freedom, and the turbulences generated around them.”

Last 12 months’s L’Oeil d’or additionally went to 2 movies: Four Daughters, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, and The Mother of All Lies, directed by Asmae El Moudir. Ben Hania’s movie went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature and was Tunisia’s official entry within the Best International Film class. The Mother of All Lies grew to become Morocco’s official entry for Best International Film.

The L’Oeil d’or prize comes with a €5,000 award. Twenty two movies vied for the “golden eye” trophy this 12 months; eligible movies can premiere in Competition, Un Certain Regard, Out of Competition, Midnight Screenings and Special Screenings, Directors’ Fortnight or Critics’ Week.

The L’Oeil d’or is a comparatively new award within the Cannes pantheon, added solely in 2015. It was created by SCAM, France’s Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia. In addition to Four Daughters, earlier winners embody a number of different movies that went on to earn Oscar nominations: Faces Places, directed by Agnès Varda and JR; For Sama, directed by Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts, and All That Breathes, directed by Shaunak Sen.