The Galician filmmaker Oliver Laxe has just won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes film festival with his film Mimosas. The jury, chaired by Valérie Donzelli, has given him an award that, in previous editions, directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Leos Carax or Wong Kar Wai have received. Thereby, Laxe receives for the second time the favor of the most prestigious film festival, after Todos vós sodes capitáns, his first feature film, won the FIPRESCI prize in 2010 and opened the international success era for the Novo Cinema Galego (New Galician Cinema)
Laxe defined Mimosas as “a religious western”, and the film relates the passage undertook by three characters that want to bury the body of a Sufi master. To reach Sijilmasa, a ruined Berber town, they have to overcome numerous trammels and cross the Atlas mountains. Muslim religion is portraited in the film in a respecful way, in a work that deals with faith looking for universality. In statements to El País, Laxe explained himself: “Making a movie is not an act of onanism: I have a responsability towards the spectator. And, at the same time, I know that the best way of communicating is leaving an open door to stupefaction and shadow”. The cold and arid landscapes of Morocco, where the director lives part of the year, have too a great importance in the film, which went through a long work process before it achieved its final form.
Mimosas is a co-production of the Galician company Zeitun Films with the Moroccan La Prod and the French Rouge International. The commercial release of the film in France (through UFO Distribution) is preview for this year’s fall, but there’s still no date for its arrival to Galicia and the rest of the Spanish State.