Cannes (AFP)

The "Queer Palm 2021", LGBT prize, was awarded Friday to the feature film "La Fracture" by French director Catherine Corsini, in official competition at the 74th Cannes Film Festival.

Created in 2010 by critic Franck Finance-Madureira, the "Queer Palm" is the Cannes equivalent of the "Teddy Awards" awarded during the Berlin Festival.

Each year, the prize rewards a film and short films dealing with LGBT, "queer" or feminist themes, among all the Cannes selections.

This year, the jury was chaired by the French actor and director Nicolas Maury, who regretted in an interview with AFP that this "central prize" was not on the winners of the Cannes Film Festival.

Catherine Corsini, the director of "La Fracture" is the second female filmmaker to obtain the "Queer Palm" after Céline Sciamma, awarded in 2019 for "Portrait of the young girl on fire".

Present in the background in much of Catherine Corsini's filmography, female homosexuality appears trivialized in "The Fracture" which tells the story of Rafaela (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a designer in a relationship with Julie (Marina Foïs), a editor who wants to leave it.

The two women find themselves in the hospital in the midst of the "yellow vests" crisis.

By juxtaposing individual stories - the fracture of a couple, but also the fracture of one part of the population vis-à-vis the other - the director weaves a powerful political narrative.

"What was close to my heart is to tell a couple of women in their fifties who lived the fact of taking responsibility. In the film, homosexuality is a subject and at the same time it is not. one because it is integrated, by overcoming prejudices. It's wonderful to be rewarded for that, "said Catherine Corsini, receiving her prize.

The jury of the "Queer Palm" also rewarded two short films in the selection of the Cinéfondation, the nursery of the Cannes Film Festival which accompanies each year students of film schools from around the world: "La Caida Del Vencejo" of the 'Spanish Gonzalo Quincoces, which features a young person from the working classes in an oppressive family setting.

The second award-winning short film is "Frida" by German artist Aleksandra Odic, which evokes the encounter between a young nurse and her patient of the same age.

© 2021 AFP