Female Dogs and Directors Dominate Palm Dog Awards

Two films, two women directors, two female dogs. Sometimes the festival writes its own thematic through-lines.

The Palm Dog — the beloved unofficial awards show celebrating the best canine performances across the festival’s official selection and various sidebars — has long since become a genuine Cannes fixture, founded by Toby Rose back in 2001. This year it delivered a double bill of canine triumph that had the beach crowd at the Cannes Members Club reaching for their metaphorical hankies — and, perhaps not coincidentally, both winning performances came from female dogs in films helmed by female directors.

The main Palm Dog went to Yuri, the roguish stray at the heart of Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor’s La Perra, premiering in Directors’ Fortnight. Named by her new owner, Silvia after a Mexican pop star whose 1980s hits ricochet from a rickety TV, Yuri upends Silvia’s solitary existence on a windswept island off the southern coast of Chile, setting the protagonist on a journey of self-discovery that forces her to confront childhood traumas.

Sotomayor, who adapted the film from Pilar Quintana’s novel, was drawn to how the source material refused to romanticize the relationship between dog and owner, and to what she called the fascinating tension between domestication and an animal’s uncontrollable nature.

Accepting the coveted embossed leather collar in person, Sotomayor said she had wanted to create a dog role that was a deep character, looking for identity and freedom. In Yuri — restless, willful, magnificently herself — she found one.

The Jury Prize went to Lola, the female canine scene-stealer from Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, also in Directors’ Fortnight and fresh from winning the sidebar’s People’s Choice Award. In the film, Lola belongs to Oli, a slacker and small-time drug dealer played by Jay Lycurgo, who is inspired to change his ways after adopting her — their relationship described by more than one reviewer as one of the most heartwarming in any film at this year’s festival. The kitchen-sink drama follows five working-class friends — Patrick, Shiv, Rian, Oli and Conor — who grew up together in a tower block in Birmingham and are now in their thirties, finding themselves on increasingly divergent, and for most of them increasingly constrained, paths to the future.

Barnard attended the ceremony with Soprano, Lola’s female stand-in and a convincing lookalike, who accepted the collar with considerable enthusiasm and even more considerable wriggling. Finding such a local substitute is a Palm Dog tradition — Rose has long made it his mission to track down lookalike dogs when the actual winners can’t make the trip.

But it was Barnard’s account of Lola’s own backstory that gave the afternoon its emotional peak. Before the collar was fastened, she described a dog who had once lived rough on the streets before being rescued by a shelter — and it was there that she was discovered and cast. The director called her journey to the Cannes canine awards a “true rags to riches story.”

The ceremony concluded with a karaoke tribute to Lola, with Tobi Rose belting out the first lines to Barry Manilow classic “Copacabana”: “Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl…”