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| The Announcement Photo: Courtesy of Venice Film Festival |
Mahmut Fazil Coskun's satirical approach to a failed Turkish coup, The Announcement won the top prize Gold Palm at Valencia's Mostra Film Festival this weekend. The award comes with a prize purse of £21,500.
The film also won the Best Screenplay award for Coskun and co-writer Ercan Kesa and the Best Cinematography award for Krum Rodríguez.
The jury, chaired by the French director of photography Marie Spencer, praised The Announcement "for the vision and skill of its director and for the perfect execution of all its departments as well as to choose a comic and absurd style to explain a daring and timely history”.
The Silver Palm, which carries an award of £8,600 went to Syrian film The Day I Lost My Shadow. The film, directed by Soudade Kaadan is a magic-realism inflected story about a mother who goes looking for a bottle of gas against the backdrop of war.
The Bronze Palm, with its £4,300 purse, went to French debut Sympathy for the Devil, directed by Guillaume de Fontenay, set on the frontline of the war in the Balkans.
Italian filmmaker Michela Occhipinti was named Best Director for her scrutiny of the Mauritanian practice of gaining weight ahead of a wedding, Flesh Out. The acting prizes went to Ahmed Hafiene for his role as an increasingly desperate father in Fatwa and Emilie Pipponier for her role in Alice, which sees a woman's life start to fall apart after she discovers her husband's secret life. Best Soundtrack was awarded to Marius Leftarache for Albanian drama A Shelter Among the Clouds.
The additional À Punt award - given to a film that “promotes the values of social integration, civility, cooperation and peace, with respect to the diversity of social, of gender, culture and geography” went to writer/director Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud for Fatwa.
