Faye Dunaway's Icon Award and a first look at Prima brought Hollywood history and a new chapter in her career together at the Deauville American Film Festival.
The September 8 program at the 52nd Deauville American Film Festival brought two debut features into Competition before turning its attention to one of the defining actresses of New Hollywood. Faye Dunaway received the festival's Icon Award, with Nicola Peltz Beckham joining the evening as their forthcoming film Prima gave the celebration a direct connection to Dunaway's next screen role.
For American audiences, Dunaway's place in film history requires little introduction. Her career includes Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Chinatown (1974), and Network (1976), four films that helped define different periods of American cinema. Her performance as television executive Diana Christensen in Network earned Dunaway the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1977.
One of the most enduring images of Dunaway's career came the morning after that Oscar victory. Photographer Terry O'Neill photographed her beside the Beverly Hills Hotel pool with the statuette and newspapers surrounding her, capturing the quiet aftermath of a very public triumph. Dunaway revisited that moment in the documentary Faye, adding another dimension to an image that has become inseparable from her Hollywood legacy.
Deauville's tribute did more than look backward. Nicola Peltz Beckham was also in attendance for Prima, the forthcoming film that brings the two actresses together, and the first trailer for the movie was shown during the evening. The presentation gave Dunaway's Icon Award a present-day connection, pairing recognition of a career spanning more than six decades with a look at what comes next.
Prima follows a devoted leading ballerina, played by Peltz Beckham, who has been raised by a strict grandmother portrayed by Dunaway. When the ballet company's director marries a contemporary choreographer, the arrival unsettles its established artistic order. Jack Huston, Mira Sorvino, and Betty Gabriel also star. The premise places inherited discipline against changing ideas about dance, making artistic control and generational expectations as central to the story as performance itself.
Earlier in the day, Deauville's Competition program opened with the 95-minute A Prayer for the Dying, followed by a discussion with director Dara Van Dusen. The film follows Civil War veteran Jacob Hansen, whose responsibilities as sheriff, undertaker, and pastor become overwhelming when an epidemic threatens his Wisconsin community. Johnny Flynn, John C. Reilly, and Kristine Kujath Thorp feature in the cast. The premise turns the promise of a fresh start into a test of responsibility, survival, and faith.
A transatlantic connection also underlies the distinctly American setting. Van Dusen is a New York-born filmmaker based in Oslo, and the film adapts Stewart O'Nan's novel about a community of Scandinavian settlers confronting the aftermath of war and another deadly threat. That background gave the Deauville Q&A a concrete point of interest: how a filmmaker working across countries approaches a story about belonging and obligation in 19th-century America.
The afternoon brought Katharina Rivilis to the C.I.D. for the 125-minute I'll Be Gone in June and a discussion following the screening. The story centers on a German student arriving in the New Mexico desert for a year abroad, where the America she imagined collides with political unease and an uncertain romance. The cast includes Naomi Cosma, David Flores, Bianca Dumais, and Rebecca Schulz.
The film's premise creates another transatlantic perspective within the day's program, this time through a young European confronting the difference between an imagined America and the country she actually encounters. Rivilis' presence at Deauville allowed audiences to discuss that collision of expectation, politics, romance, and identity directly with the filmmaker.
The evening continued with The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, which appears in the French festival program as The Last Pickpocket in New York. Directed by Noah Segan, the 88-minute feature stars John Turturro alongside Giancarlo Esposito, Will Price, Tatiana Maslany, Steve Buscemi, and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Turturro plays a pickpocket who steals and sells a valuable USB drive, only to discover that the consequences extend far beyond an ordinary theft. His attempt to recover it pulls him into conflict with a criminal organization, bringing a distinctly New York crime story to a Deauville program that had moved throughout the day between emerging filmmakers and established Hollywood talent.
Yet September 8 ultimately belonged to Dunaway. Deauville's Icon Award recognized the performances that made her one of the defining faces of American cinema. At the same time, Peltz Beckham's appearance and the first look at Prima kept the tribute from becoming simply a retrospective. For an actress whose career has repeatedly been associated with ambitious, formidable, and complicated women, the evening connected the roles that established her legacy with another still waiting to reach the screen.
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