Bound In Heaven, the feature debut of director Huo Xin, won the top prize at the 2024 Rome Film Festival, with the awards unveiled at the Auditorium Parco della Musica on October 26.
The romantic crime drama won best film in the Progressive Cinema Competition, the festival’s competitive strand, and also shared the best first feature award ex aequo with Edgardo Pistone’s Ciao Bambino.
Bound In Heaven premiered at Toronto, and features a starry cast including Ni Ni, Zhou You and Liao Fan. Director Huo is a veteran scriptwriter whose credits includeShower, Kung Fu Hustle, Sunflower and The Monkey King. Redience is handling sales on the film.
ThrillerLa Nuit Se Traîne from Belgium’s Michiel Blanchart, about a locksmith who gets dragged into the life of a mob boss, won the grand jury prize. Morrisa Maltz won best director for South Dakota-set drama Jazzy featuring Lily Gladstone.
The best actor prize went to Elio Germano for playing communist politican Enrico Berlinguer in The Grand Ambition. Ángela Molina won best actress for Carlos Marquès-Marcet’sThey Will Be Dust, about a women with an incurable brain tumour who takes a last trip to an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland.
Chris Andrews won best screenplay for sheep-farming revenge drama Bring Them Down, starring Barry Keoghan.
Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita In Tehran was another of the night’s big winners. The adaptation of Azar Nafisi’s memoir, about a professor returning to her home country of Iran during the 1978 revolution, won the audience award and a special jury prize for its cast, led by Golshifteh Farahani.
The jury for the main competition strand was chaired by director Pablo Trapero and also included editor Francesca Calvelli, French actress Laetitia Casta, UK producer Gail Egan, and writer and screenwriter Dennis Lehane.
Italian director and screenwriter Francesca Comencini led the first feature jury, that also included producer, composer and writer Kai li Peng and Anatomy Of A Fall actor Antoine Reinartz.
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