Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon may have walked away with most of the plaudits and the attention, but this year's Cannes festival was also a success for Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete / A Prophet, which picked up the Grand Prix. It also won the Best Film award at this year's London Film Festival, and the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc, and was France's submission for the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Sony Pictures Classics have picked up distribution, and you can see their trailer in hi-def over at Apple. The film features newcomer Tahir Rahim as Malik, a disenfranchised and illiterate North African whose imprisonment for an unspecified charge sets him on a course to organised crime kingpin-ship, when he comes under the wing of the Corsican mob.
If you've seen Audiard's previous The Beat That My Heart Skipped you'll have some idea of the tone to expect. At heart Un Prophete is a genre film, but it has a lot to say about France's Islamic population (not unlike Rachid Bouchareb's **Indigenes / **Days of Glory) and its prison system.
Next year's Gomorra? Find out when it's released in the UK on January 22nd.