A County Durham-made drama which is all set for its premiere at Cannes Film Festival is being tipped for the top award.
Ken Loach's new film, The OId Oak, which was shot in the region last year, will be in the festival spotlight at the weekend when it is set to have its eagerly-awaited official debut screening. And there is already talk that the film might win the coveted Palme d'Or Award.
This award is the festival's highest honour and it was won by I, Daniel Blake in 2016, the first film Loach made in the North East. The acclaimed director followed up with Sorry We Missed You, which also was selected for a screening at Cannes - an honour in itself, and now The Old Oak, which is to the 86-year-old's last film, has followed suit.
Read more: The story of The Old Oak's journey to Cannes
A new study is predicting it will emerge as the Palme d'Or Award winner. Using data from film database IMDb, comparing previous film successes and looking at criteria including directors' previous wins, casts, run-times and genre, online casino company Japan 101 has ranked its top 20 films predicted for success at the film festival which is now in its 76th year.
Its list sees The Old Oak, a story about the clash between residents of a mining village and the arrival of Syrian refugees, come out top. The film, which co-stars a retired local firefighter in a lead role as the landlord of a pub at the heart of the tale, was filmed in Murton and other areas around County Durham.
In competition with a host of other groundbreaking new work, it is due to be screened at the festival on Saturday. Based on its criteria, the new study scores it a total of 53.65 out of 100, with Perfect Days - a Japanese-German film directed by Wim Wenders, another previous Palme d'Or winner, predicted to be second favourite with 31.34 points.
A spokesman for the study referred to Loach as one of Britain’s most prolific and most political of directors and said that, based on a formula from previous Palme d'Or award winners, The Old Oak is "most likely to bring home the prize, with director Ken Loach and star members of the cast previously bringing home the prestigious award".
The rest of the top 10 films listed feature other big names and a real mix of subjects. This year, there is also said to be a record number of female filmmakers in the competition, with a total of seven of the 21 competition titles being directed by females and some of them also feature in the list.
The study places in third place the film A Brighter Tomorrow and this is followed by the films About Dry Grasses; Fallen Leaves; Monster, Homecoming, May December, Last Summer and Black Flies.
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