Jane Campion has become the first female to direct the ALPC Luxembourg film journalists’ association’s choice for film of the year. Netflix’s The Power of the Dog, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee, picked up the prize after a third round of voting at the association’s annual general meeting last Friday.

The ALPC cites the way Campion “dissects with a scalpel the strength and weakness of man against the backdrop of psychological entrapment that leaves you speechless.” They said that the director, just like in her 1993 Palme d’Or winner The Piano, presents a work “with a sublime aesthetics and cinematography that highlights the characters.”

Two further female directors were also in the running for the top prize, with Campion just pipping Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida?  and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland into second and third place respectively. Florian Zeller’s The Father and Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn completed the ALPC’s top five selection for 2021.

The association, created in 2014, has only been handing out the award since 2015, when its first winner was Xavier Dolan’s Mommy. Since then the film of the year prize has gone to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Todd Philipps’s Joker. Nolan won again in 2020 for Tenet.