Take Shelter takes top prize at Deauville

Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, starring Michael Shannon as an Ohio man struggling with mental illness, has won the Grand Prize at the 37th Deauville American Film Festival.

The film, which also features Jessica Chastain in the cast, already won the top prize at Cannes Critics’ Week in May having also screened in competition at Sundance prior to that. It screens this week in Toronto.

“He is a young cineaste who is preparing his third film, who writes wonderfully for the cinema and is a formidable director of actors,” jury president director Olivier Assayas said of Nichols, who is currently preparing his next feature Mud.

Neither Nichols nor Shannon, who touched down in Deauville earlier in the festival, was present to accept the award. A representative of the film’s French distributors Ad Vitam, which will release the picture in France on December 7, picked up the prize instead.

The film was in competition with 13 other first and second American features which included Liza Johnson’s Return, Andrew Okpeaha Maclean’s On the Ice and Sam Levinson’s Another Happy Day.

In other awards, Matthew Gordon’s debut feature Dynamiter, about a mixed-up Mississippi teenager, won the Jury Prize.

Tony Kaye’s Detachment, starring Adrien Brody as a teacher in a tough high school, won Deauville’s new Revelation award. The feature also picked up the International Critics’ Prize. It will be distributed by Pretty Pictures in France.