Best director and actor wins for South Korea at Cannes

CANNES • The South Korean cinema industry added to a global winning streak last Saturday by scooping two key prizes at the Cannes Film Festival for a pair of beloved veterans.

Star film-maker Park Chan-wook clinched the Best Director award for his erotic crime movie, Decision To Leave, while actor Song Kang-ho, best known for his role in the Oscar-winning Parasite (2019), picked up the Best Actor gong for Broker.

Park's Cannes entry came nearly two decades after his Oldboy (2003) won the festival's second-highest prize in 2004.

That mind-bending shocker helped catapult South Korean cinema onto the global stage - years before Parasite won the 2019 Palme d'Or and Best Picture at the 2020 Academy Awards.

Decision To Leave features Chinese star Tang Wei and South Korean actor Park Hae-il.

It tells the story of a detective who, investigating a man's fatal fall from a mountain, comes under the spell of the victim's wife, whom he suspects of having caused her husband's death.

The detective story, which drew comparisons with the far more sexually explicit thriller Basic Instinct (1992), increasingly meshes with the mutual attraction engulfing the main characters.

"I'm not a romantic, but I'm very interested in the expression of emotions," said Park Chan-wook, 58, when the film premiered at the festival.

Song, 55, won acting honours for his role in Broker, about a woman dropping off an unwanted child in a "baby box" for adoption.

He plays a kind-hearted middleman trying to sell the infant to a loving family in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda's first Korean-language feature. Kore-eda, 59, won the Palme d'Or in 2018 for his touching family tale, Shoplifters.

Song said while accepting the trophy that the language and cultural barriers posed no problems on set.

"Kore-eda is very familiar with Korean culture, so there weren't any differences when it came to getting along," he said.

Meanwhile, Triangle Of Sadness, a viciously sharp satire about class conflict, won the Palme d'Or for Best Picture.

It was the second time the film's Swedish director Ruben Ostlund, 48, has won the prize after he first scooped the Palme in 2017 for The Square.

This time, he turned his gaze on fashion models and the ultra-rich, who find their status suddenly undermined when disaster strikes a cruise ship.

An extended sequence of projectile vomiting and violent diarrhoea on the ship quickly became the talk of the festival after its premiere last week, leaving viewers either howling with laughter or turning green.

Iranian actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who lives in exile following a smear campaign about her love life, won the Best Actress award.

Ebrahimi, 41, won for Holy Spider, in which she plays a journalist trying to solve the serial murders of prostitutes in the holy city of Mashhad.

Holy Spider, directed by Danish-Iranian Ali Abbasi, is inspired by the true story of a working-class man who killed prostitutes in the early 2000s and became known as the "Spider Killer".

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE