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With Cannes Film Festival screenings fully under way, Paddy Power opens its ‘Palme d’Or winner market’ placing European cinema ‘darlings’ Ken Loach and Pedro Almodovar as joint favourites to take the top honour at the 69th festival.
Jointly priced at 6/1 Ken Loach’s ‘I, Daniel Bale’ and Pedro Almodovar ‘Julieta’ lead the market in the festival’s opening week.
Screening on the festival’s opening day, Loach’s ‘I, Daniel Bale’ has received early critical acclaim, telling the Dickensian story of a carpenter who falls terminally ill and struggles with the red tape of the UK welfare support system.
Renowned for his hard-hitting social subject matters, Loach has been described as a ‘festival perennial;’ having won three Special Jury Prizes and the Palme D’OR for his 2006 IRA drama ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley”.
Cannes audiences are now eagerly awaiting the screening of Pedro Almodovar’s twentieth film ‘Julieta’, his ambitious Madrid adaptation of Canadian Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Munro’s trio of short stories Chance,” “Soon” and “Silence”.
Almodovar whose films’ centre on female led narratives, is one of Europe’s most revered directors having won multiple Special Jury Prizes at Cannes, however, the director has yet to win the Palme D’OR accolade.
The festival’s two-week lineup will debut hundreds of films to critics and audiences, Paddy Power notes that market pricing for the Palme d’Or will likely change during the period as the festival has had a history of rewarding surprise and shock winners.
Paddy Power Cannes Palme d’Or 2016 market
