Other winners include She Male Snails, Corpo Celeste, Stopped On Track and Sons of Norway.

Company Orheim, a moving Norwegian film about a teenage boy growing up with a tyrannical, alcoholic father and an abused mother, won the Dragon Award for best Nordic film at the Gothenberg International Film Festival closing awards ceremony on Saturday night.

Directed by Arild Andresen, the film won the coveted prize of SEK1m presented by the Ernstrom Group.

But the jury, headed by Austria’s Jessica Hausner, admitted that the deliberation was divided and it chose to give a special mention to Sweden’s She Male Snails, a documentary of sorts by Ester Martin Bergsmark which explores the notion of people who believe themselves both male and female.

“We have to admit that we, the jury, had a hard time choosing the best film,” said the jury statement, read by Hausner on Saturday night. “We had very different responses and opinions and we had to accept that in the end, it is a very subjective matter whether you find a film good or not. This is why we asked the festival for permission to name a jury’s honourable mention. And this is what we are doing, we’re giving an honourable mention to a film that went beyond simple storytelling and reached a philosophical quality by touching a very sensible, even existential theme: the fragile construction of what you call your personality.”

She Male Snails, however, did pick up the audience award for best Nordic film as well as the Kodak Nordic Vision Award for cinematography which went to Minka Jakerson as well as Bergsmark.

Other juried prizes included the Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award which went to Alice Rohrwacher’s Italian film Corpo Celeste; and best Swedish documentary Dragon award which went to For You Naked by Sara Broos.

Audience award for best feature film in the festival went to Andreas Dresen’s Stopped On Track and the FIPRESCI award went to Jens Lien’s Sons Of Norway.

Other Awards included:
Church Of Sweden Film Award: Flicker, directed by Patrik Eklund
Lorens Award: producer Josefine Tengblad, for Kiss Me
Dragon Award for new talent: House by Ahmad Saleh (Jordan)



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