FRANCE – It wasn’t long after the first press screening of the period drama Loving at Cannes on Monday morning, that the movie was already generating awards-season talk. It’s absurdly early for Oscar to be sure, but it’s also not hard to see why.

In Loving, writer-director Jeff Nichols (Midnight Special, Mud) dramatizes one of America’s most seminal civil rights Supreme Court cases, Loving v. Virginia, but he does so by focusing on the quiet, heartbreaking love story at its center: the marriage of Mildred and Richard Loving (Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton), a black woman and a white man who were arrested in their home — in their bedroom — in Virginia one night in 1958 because the simple fact of their union violated state law. When the credits for the movie rolled, it received one of the festival’s biggest ovations yet, with more applause for the actors’ names when they appeared onscreen.(yahoomovies)…[+]