Hungarian Director Wins Short Film Palme d’Or in Cannes

Hungarian director Anna Buda Flóra's animated film '27', a French-Hungarian co-production, won the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film at the 76th Cannes International Film Festival Saturday night.

The 11-minute-long film is about 27-year-old Alice who, even though she is suffocating a bit, she still lives with her parents and tends to live in her dreams to escape her dreary everyday life. After a psychedelic party on a factory roof, she has a serious drunken bike accident.

Anna Buda Flóra told MTI in Cannes that she had been working on her animation 27 for ten years, and wanted to make a film about the housing crisis.

"The film is about how a young woman's sexual fantasies are linked to the confinement she experiences as an adult living with her parents. So, I made a social porn," she stressed.

Selected from 4,288 films, eleven shorts, coming from twelve countries (Argentina, Colombia, Spain, the United States, France, Hungary, Indonesia, Iceland, Norway, Poland, the United Kingdom and Ukraine), were presented this year in Competition.

The Short Film Palme d'Or prize was handed over by the Jury, chaired by Hungarian film director Ildikó Enyedi, during the closing ceremony of the festival.

The last time a Hungarian production won the main prize at the Cannes Short Film Competition was in 2002, with Péter Mészáros' short film After the Rain, and before that, Marcell Iványi's film Wind was awarded the Palme d'Or in 1996. 

Following its premiere in Cannes, '27' will be screened in June in Annecy, one of the world's most prestigious animation film festivals, where it will also be included in the Short Film Competition, but before that, domestic audiences will be able to see the film at the Friss Hús Budapest International Short Film Festival from June 1-7.