Gints Zilbalodis’ animated feature Flow, Latvia’s submission for the Oscars, won the €2,000 Golden Athena award for best film at the Athens International Film Festival (October 2-14).
The film, which also collected the audience award, premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section earlier this year and has since won prizes at Annecy, Melbourne, and Guadalajara, and has been shortlisted for the upcoming European film awards.
It centres on a cat who teams up with a capybara, a lemur, a bird, and a dog after a flood destroys his home. Local theatrical distributor and platform Cinobo picked up Greek rights.
The five-strong international jury comprised writer and former Scala programmer Jane Giles, Galway Film Fleadh CEO Miriam Allen, producer and former senior vp European film distribution at Warner Bros Sarig Peker, and composers Blaine L. Reininger and Alexis Grapsas.
Colombian-American Alessandra Lacorazza’s sophomore effort In The Summers won the best director award. A coming-of-age story set in a New Mexico small town, it premiered in Sundance where it won the US Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and the section’s best director prize.
Another sophomore feature effort, Italian Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio won the best screenplay award. It won the Silver Lion at Venice last month, and was picked up for Greece by Weird Wave.
Special mentions went Lin Jianjie’s Brief History Of A Family and Déa Kulumbegashvili’s Venice prize winner April.
Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s debut Armand received the Greek film critics’ award (PEKK). The film was picked up for Greece by Cinobo.
Documentary competition
In the documentary competition, No Other Land won the €2,000 Golden Athena best film prize. From the Palestinian-Israeli team of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, it tells the story of Palestinian activist Adra’s fight against the destruction of his community.
It was previously awarded prizes in Berlin. Film Trade will distribute it in Greece.
Special mentions went to Mark Cousins’ To Deeper Things and Daphne Matziaraki and Peter Murimi’s The Battle for Laikipia.
The documentary jury comprised CPH:DOX artistic director Niklas Engstrøm, filmmakers Valerie Kontakos and her colleague Vassilis Loules, and journalists Arne Semsrott and Stavroula Papaspyrou.
In the documentary section, Anastasia Trofimova’s controversial documentary Russians At War was cancelled hours before the screening was due to take place. A statement from the festival said: “The decision to cancel the public screenings was made for the safety of both the audience and the festival staff”.
Screenings of the film were also cancelled at Toronto due to threats made to the festival.
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