Who among the following won the best actress award in the Un Certain Regard category of the Cannes Film Festival, 2024 ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Anasuya Sengupta. At the 77th Cannes Film Festival, held from 14 to 25 May 2024, the Un Certain Regard jury gave its Performance Prize to Anasuya Sengupta for her role in The Shameless, a film directed by the Bulgarian filmmaker Konstantin Bojanov; the prize was shared with Abou Sangaré for Souleymane's Story. She is the first Indian to win an acting award in the Un Certain Regard section. It was an unusually good festival for India. Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light took the Grand Prix — the second-highest honour at Cannes, after the Palme d'Or, which went to Sean Baker's Anora — and Chidananda S. Naik of FTII Pune won the first prize in the student section, La Cinef, for Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know. Two things are worth fixing in memory here. First, Un Certain Regard is a distinct competitive section of Cannes, parallel to the main Competition, meant for original and unconventional work, with its own jury and its own slate of awards; a prize there is not a Palme d'Or and should never be reported as one. Second, the commission's phrase 'best actress award' is loose — the section's acting honour is formally a Performance Prize and in 2024 it was shared between a woman and a man — but there is no ambiguity about who the Indian winner was, and (b) is the only defensible option.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Wrong. Kiara Advani is a Hindi-film actress who has appeared at Cannes as an invited guest and brand ambassador, which is the sort of appearance that fills Indian news coverage of the festival every May. Her name does not appear anywhere in the 2024 prize list, in Un Certain Regard or any other section.  (c) Wrong, and included for the same reason as (a). Red-carpet presence at Cannes is a matter of invitation and sponsorship, not of competition; a film has to be selected into a section and then win a jury vote for an award. No award at the 2024 festival went to her.  (d) Wrong. She is not among the winners at Cannes 2024. The full 2024 prize list contains exactly one Indian acting winner — Anasuya Sengupta, in Un Certain Regard — alongside Payal Kapadia's Grand Prix and Chidananda S. Naik's La Cinef first prize.

Concept: The Cannes Film Festival, held each May at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes on the French Riviera, is organised in several sections. The main Competition awards the Palme d'Or, then the Grand Prix, then the Jury Prize, plus prizes for direction, screenplay and acting. Un Certain Regard is a second competitive section, introduced in 1978, reserved for films with an unusual point of view or an unconventional narrative; it has its own jury and its own awards, including a performance prize. Separate again are Out of Competition screenings, the parallel sections Directors' Fortnight and Critics' Week, and La Cinef, the student-film competition. Knowing which section a prize came from is what separates a correct answer from an approximate one.

State PCS 2024 Q56 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q56 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer