Cannes Festival: The Palme d'Or Goes to French Director Jacques Audiard

The film "Dheepan" by French director Jacques Audiard won the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. This year's Best Director award went to renowned Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien. Audiard's film, which marks the 68th Palme d'Or win, tells the story of Sri Lankan refugees, including a former rebel from that country, trying to start a new life in France. Receiving the award from the Coen brothers, he described it as "very exceptional." Joel and Ethan Coen chaired this year's jury. It has been said that the film Dheepan was influenced by Montesquieu's famous work "Persian Letters." Mr. Audiard, born in 1952, is the son of Michel Audiard, a famous French screenwriter and director. His previous films, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" in 2005 and "A Prophet" in 2009, won the César and BAFTA awards for Best Foreign Language Film. He has also won the Grand Prix at Cannes once before. This year's Grand Prix went to the film "Son of Saul," the debut work of Hungarian director László Nemes, set in the Auschwitz camp. Hou Hsiao-hsien, the 68-year-old renowned figure of the Taiwanese New Wave, also won Best Director for his martial arts drama "The Assassin," which depicts a woman in the ninth century who is ordered to kill the man she loves. Hou Hsiao-hsien is a well-known figure in Taiwanese cinema and has previously won prestigious awards. His film "City of Sadness" won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1989, and "The Puppetmaster" won the third prize at Cannes in 1993. He originally hails from Guangdong, China, and came to Taiwan with his family in 1947, part of the wave of hundreds of thousands fleeing the Chinese Civil War and the rise of the Maoists. He studied cinema in Taiwan and began filmmaking in the 1970s.