Georgian writer/director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April won the best film award at the 29th Vilnius International Film Festival known locally as Kino Pavasaris, on March 23.
The drama about an ob-gyn specialist in a small hospital in rural Georgia, who risks herself to care for her female patients, picked up €8,000 for the prize established by Vilnius City Municipality and took home a statuette designed by Lithuanian artist Vilius Dringelis, specially commissioned as part of the festival’s 30th anniversary celebrations.
The Georgia-France-Italy project premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2024.
The international jury was comprised of Polish film critic and programmer Adam Kruk, producer and founder of Reason8 Films Denis Krupnow, director and producer Giedrė Žickytė, senior programmer of the Sundance Film Festival Heidi Zwicker and Iranian director Mania Akbari. It described Kulumbegashvili’s film as uncompromising while deploying “transcendently beautiful and frequently unsettling imagery to examine the way cultural oppression imperils and controls people’s rights and bodies”.
April came from an eight-strong field of first or second feature-length films by European directors.
The jury also gave a special mention to Romanian director Bogdan Mureșanu’s debut The New Year That Never Came, which impressed “with a precise and witty depiction of the dual reality of fear and absurdity that shapes lives within a totalitarian system, while also depicting the strength of resistance and hope”, said the jury.
Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig won the audience award while the best Lithuanian feature film prize went to Giedrė Beinoriūtė’s documentary On Sacred And Profane.
The €2,000 Young Filmmaker Award, established by the Vida Ramaškienė Foundation to celebrate an artist whose experience includes work on film sets, film education, editing and video art, was presented to film editor Ignė Narbutaitė.
The awards ceremony brought the curtain down on 17 days of screenings and events.
“This year, a record number of almost 130,000 people visited the festival,” said festival director Algirdas Ramaška. “It is good to know that we have so many like-minded people, friends and strangers, who have watched, commented, and met the guests of the festival.”
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