While the Cannes Film Festival is the place to discover new films and talent, it’s also an important moment in the industry calendar to recognise the hard work of the people behind the scenes. This is the case with the Prix Angénieux, awarded on Friday in Cannes to cinematographers from Australia and South Korea.
The annual Prix Angénieux prize, now in its 12th year, was established to bring image experts – without whom cinema would not exist – into focus.
Many films released recently have benefited from the high-quality lenses made by the French company, named after Pierre Angénieux, who founded it 90 years ago.
These include the 2024 Palme d'Or winner Anora by Sean Baker, and Jury Prize Emilia Perez by Jacques Audiard, among many others.
The 2025 recipients are Australia’s Dion Beebe, who won the Prix Angénieux tribute award and South Korea’s Eunsoo Cho, who won the Prix Angénieux Encouragement Award.
They were invited to the Cannes Film Festival to attend an award ceremony and a gala dinner on Friday.
Known for stylised, highly saturated colour palettes and an experimental approach to high-speed digital video, Beebe has collaborated with top names in Hollywood from Jane Campion (Holy Smoke) to Michael Mann (Collateral and Miami Vice).
One of his key artistic partnerships over the years has been with American director Rob Marshall, who he credits with having “taught” him so much about camera work and the “language of movement”.
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Their first project together was the film musical Chicago, released in 2002.
It was the first musical in 34 years to win the Academy Award for Best Movie, along with awards for Best Supporting Actress (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and four technical Academy awards.
“Rob is an amazing storyteller and has a wonderful sense showmanship and spectacle,” Beebe tells RFI in Cannes.
Language of movement
"Every time an actor walks in a room and the camera is in the room with them, there's choreography. The movement for him is crucial. When actors pick something up, he looks at the height of that table they pick it up from, because that affects movement."
When asked about how he works with actors, he said that is an important part of the cinematographer’s work.
"Protecting and looking after the actors is really such an important part of the cinematographer’s role. There really has to be a lot of trust," Beebe told RFI.
He recounts the rumours about working with a "difficult" Christian Bale, with whom he worked on Equilibrium by Kurt Wimmer (2002).
Compassion
He says that more compassion is needed on set to help the actor get to "a vulnerable place" in order to be convincing in their role.
"The truth is for an actor in a role, it's incredibly tough to create this sort of belief that you're in their world. Everything we see, of course, as the viewer, as the cinematographer is the perfect view of this movie, but what the actor sees is just a mess. It's not as immersive as we might think for the actor."
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Winner of numerous awards over the past thirty years; he received the Academy Award for Best Cinematography and a BAFTA in the same category for his work on Rob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha in 2006.
He is currently finishing a film with Antoine Fuqua, Michael, a biopic about Michael Jackson.
Eunsoo Cho is a graduate of the Korean National University of Arts and the University Of Southern California School Of Cinematic Arts.
She has shot numerous fiction and documentary shorts in Africa, Asia, and North America.
Inspired by Tim Burton growing up – she says she decided to be a cinematographer because she wanted to "have the director's ear".
"I didn’t know what they really did besides standing behind the cameras. Later on, I gradually learned what it is and it was even more fascinating," she told RFI.
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Although animal documentaries were her first preference, she has loved filming people and helping them tell their stories, such as her most recent project – The Last of the Sea Women – by Sue Kim (2024). It profiles the Haenyeo, a community of female divers on South Korea’s Jeju Island who have harvested seafood without oxygen tanks for centuries.
Her work beside acclaimed documentary cinematographer Iris Ng for this film won the Best Cinematography award at the 9th Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards.
'Art of emptiness'
For her, cinematographers are the "shadows that complete the existence" of a film – always present but never seen.
She says that her Korean cultural heritage has guided her in her filmmaking approach, particularly when it comes to using space.
"I’m not sure I can speak for Koreans or Korean culture in general but I think we naturally try to do less. We don’t try to fill every corner and every space," Cho says, adding this is concept comes from Korean paintings.
"I try to do less. I try not to use many lights. I try not to use many objects in the frame. I try to concentrate on a few and emphasise them."
Cho's encouragement prize includes a special endowment allowing her to use optimal Angénieux technologies to capture the images of her next project, which is about to be signed off – but for now – Mum's the word.
