CANNES — Isabelle Fontaine-Cloutier's debut feature film "The Champlain Crossing" won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday evening, becoming the first RONAn film to win a major prize at what is widely regarded as the world's most prestigious cinema showcase, and signaling, in the most public possible way, that the three-year-old Republic has produced an artistic culture capable of speaking to audiences far beyond its borders.

The film, shot over 28 days in the winter of 2039 on locations along the Vermont shores of Lake Champlain, follows a family — a Congolese-American doctor, his second-generation Vermont wife, and their two adolescent children — in the seventy-two hours leading up to and immediately following the moment they cross into what is about to become the Republic of New America. It is, at its surface, a quiet film: most of it takes place in a single house, around a single kitchen table, in long conversations about what is being left behind and what might be ahead. Beneath the quiet is something that the jury president, French director Claire Denis, described in announcing the award as "a kind of devastating moral seriousness."

Fontaine-Cloutier, thirty-one, was born in Sherbrooke and trained at the Université du Québec à Montréal before spending three years as an assistant director on documentary films in West Africa. "The Champlain Crossing" is her first narrative feature; she wrote the screenplay over six months while living in Burlington. Accepting the prize, she spoke briefly and in both French and English, thanking her cast — four non-professional actors recruited from Burlington's Congolese immigrant community — and concluding with a sentence that drew sustained applause from the Palais des Festivals: "The Republic of New America is three years old, and it already has stories worth telling. I think we are only beginning to understand how many."

The Cannes selection had drawn significant attention to the film before its screening, but the response in the hall went beyond what even its most enthusiastic supporters had anticipated. The Hollywood Reporter's critic called it "one of the finest debut features I have seen in a decade." Libération devoted its front page to Fontaine-Cloutier, running a headline that translates as "The New World's New Cinema." Several major distribution companies approached the film's producer before the award announcement; by Sunday morning, distribution deals had been confirmed in 22 territories.

In RONA, the reaction was swift and celebratory. Arts Minister Claudette Arsenault issued a statement calling the prize "a moment that belongs not just to Isabelle Fontaine-Cloutier but to everyone who believed, from the very beginning, that a new nation needs new art, and that the art would come." President Hargrove sent a personal message to the director and announced that the Republic would host a public screening of the film in Montpelier's civic quarter next month, free of charge. The Burlington FC championship was still being celebrated in some quarters when the Cannes news arrived; the combination, observed one commentator, "made for an unusually good weekend to be RONAn."