Acclaimed filmmaker Sofia Coppola has won the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her latest cinematic masterpiece, The Beguiled.
Incredibly, 46-year-old Coppola is only the second woman to win the coveted award in the festival’s 70-year-long history, breaking the female drought since Soviet filmmaker Yuliya Solntseva won for her 1961 film The Chronicle of Flaming Years.
During her acceptance speech, the mother-of-two thanked “my father [Francis Ford Coppola], who taught me about writing and directing and for sharing his love of cinema, and to my mother [Eleanor Coppola] for encouraging me to be an artist.”
The director, whose previous works include The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette also thanked Campion for paving the way for other women at Cannes.
Part thriller, part period drama meets Picnic at Hanging Rock in the deep south of America, The Beguiled is due to hit cinemas in late June and boasts a standout lineup of Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning and Colin Farrell.
The film is based on Thomas Cullinan's novel of the same name, in which a wounded soldier is discovered by the students of a Virginian girl's school and taken in to recover, with disastrous effects.
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