The films that the Jury considered, ex-aequo, to have the boldest artistic approaches in the Official Competition were The Shrouds, by David Cronenberg, and Meeting with Pol Pot (Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot), by Rithy Panh. According to the Jury, “David Cronenberg has always defied time, each of his films is a machine with which we travel into unexplored territories: around us because his gaze on reality and its transformations is always on; inside us because his films watch us, unearthing fears and desires that are sometimes unconfessable. The Shrouds pushes this journey even further. The outside world in the film is clearly ours, indeed it is the world as it will be in the near future. The Shrouds is science fiction because Cronenberg enters into the future with acuity and irony, as hardly anyone does want to do anymore, and that would be enough to make it a political film as well. But The Shrouds is above all a deeply human film. The grief and mourning that animate the narrative are crossed without any fear, with a moving sense of truth, and this journey is incredibly transformed for us into vital energy. It is a gift. It is from this human transformation that cinema springs forth, free, unrestrained, one image after another, one body after another, pure beauty.”
The Jury considered Meeting with Pol Pot (Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot) “a conceptual, as well as an emotional tour-de-force, of painful relevance for our present-day political conundrums. The film shifts seamlessly and courageously between cinematic language registers: - fiction and non-fiction, staged re-enactments of a traumatic past and archive footage, flesh and blood actors and their uncanny miniature, wooden alter-egos, - to make not only visible, but viscerally felt – the violence, propaganda and horrors of autoritarian regimes. A look into the power mechanisms of political repression, while utopian ideologies get disconnected from our humanity.”