Cannes Film Festival: a Palme d'honneur for Forest Whitaker, actor committed to Africa
American actor Forest Whitaker receiving an honorary Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, May 17, 2022. Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP - Vianney Le Caer
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In Cannes, where the 75th Film Festival opened, Forest Whitaker was the international star of the evening of Tuesday May 17.
The American actor received an honorary Palme d'Or for a career marked in particular by the Performance Prize received here in 1988 in
Bird
, by Clint Eastwood.
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We saw him as a bloodthirsty tyrant in Kevin Macdonald's
The Last King of Scotland
in 2006, where he played
Idi Amin Dada
.
He was also a contract killer in
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
, by Jim Jarmusch in 1999. But naturally, Forrest Whitaker seems the most peaceful of men.
The 60-year-old actor isn't content to just shine in Hollywood.
Ten years ago, he created an NGO that fights poverty, from South Sudan to Mexico.
A humanitarian fiber born during filming on the African continent.
“
I was working in Uganda and I met the director of an orphanage in the north of the country.
And I recognized, in the eyes of the children, what I had experienced myself growing up
: the stress, the problems that we have to overcome.
I started to work in Uganda, to create housing, and then with Unesco, to set up branches elsewhere in the world.
But of course it all started when I connected to my African roots
,” he explains.
He is a look, a way, a legend that impresses...
Actor, director and producer Forest Whitaker will receive an honorary Palme d'Or at the Opening Ceremony of the 75th Cannes Film Festival this evening at 7 p.m.
#Cannes2022 pic.twitter.com/gp8BO9YfeE
— Cannes Film Festival (@Festival_Cannes) May 17, 2022
A humanitarian commitment that also goes through France, with
actions planned in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis
.
Forest Whitaker also mixes cinema and humanitarianism by producing the documentary
Au nom de la Paix
, a film directed by Christophe Castagne and Thomas Sametin, shot in a camp for displaced people in South Sudan and screened here as a world premiere.
American actor Forest Whitaker on the Cannes Croisette, May 17, 2022. Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP - Joel C Ryan
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