Luc Besson

The rock star treatment was reserved for French renegade director Luc Besson who was honored with a career achievement tribute: "I feel honored, for sure," he said at a press conference, "because I am never honored in my own country." His latest film, Angel-A, in addition to the animated Arthur and the Minimoys, is a return to directing after a period of self-confessed recuperation after the exhausting rigors of directing The Fifth Element: "It was a rollercoaster for two years. After a while I just needed to redefine my point of view, to be sure that if I am [directing] it is because I really like it and I want to say [something]." The film, in black-and-white and set against sweeping views of Paris, is a romantic comedy imbued with a light air of fantasy. We meet petty criminal Andre (Jamal Debbouze) who, up to his neck in debt and with no hope of extricating himself from his financial woes, decides to fling himself into the Seine. Instead, a statuesque blonde (Rie Rasmussen) beats him to it from the same bridge. In saving her, the two are bonded together in a quest for salvation. The motivation to make the film came from a need "to find [one's] real position in a society where everything is fake. It is a large problem and I think it is the problem where all the problems come from…I needed to go back to something smaller and focused on characters and dialogue. I went all around Europe and Asia with the film where obviously the film made much less money than The Fifth Element or Transporter but I met so many directors and producers who thanked me because if someone like me can at 45-years [of age] stop and make a black-and-white film with two unknown people in French which has talking all the time, it just proves to every one that they can do it too." Well, perhaps not everyone: Besson remains a unique visionary.

But the awards ceremony belonged to Red Road, Andrea Arnold's first installment in a triptych of films that is the brainchild of bad boy Lars von Trier: all will be set in Scotland using the same cast but are helmed by three different directors with their own scripts. The film took top honors in the World Cinema Competition as well as the International Federation of Film Critics Prize. Having already picked up the Jury Prize at Cannes as well as two British Film Awards, Red Road was well positioned to sweep the top honors and only reinforces Arnold's status as one of the hottest talents emerging from Britain.