Kyoto sister city initiation commenced with the city of Paris, in France in 1957.
To commemorate the 1st edition of Kyoto International Movie Festival, we set up Most Respect Award in Paris, and award Ms. Irene Jacob, a winner of Best Actress at Cannes Film Festival, who worked with some of the greatest filmmakers in the world, the one who deserves recognition from Paris, the city of art.

It was 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and winds of change swept across Europe in politics, economy, culture and values.There’s a scene in The Double Life of Veronique where Irene Jacob walks by the truck carrying a huge statue of Lenin and it epitomized such sweeping changes happening in Europe at the time. Born in France, Irene Jacob has an eclectic career includes films directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski, a Polish, Michelangelo Antonioni, an Italian, Theodoros Angelopoulos, a Greek, and many other European directors. Her filmography represents her career as a borderless actress. And let us not to mention her Hollywood outing in U.S. Marshals (1998), a follow up to The Fugitive (1993) and other films where she displayed her talent without any difficulties. She was 24 years old when she worked on The Double Life of Veronique and she is now 48 years old. If 1990 is to divide her career in half, then, her career up to 2014 is exactly the half of her life. Is it just a coincidence that Irene Jacob played the double life of heroines who look the same in The Double Life of Veronique, which became a milestone in her career as well as the history of cinema?

Takeo Matsuzai, Film Critic