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The Kings Of The World
Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival
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Laura Mora’s Columbian film The Kings of the World took home the Golden Shell at San Sebastian Festival’s 70th edition. The film - a coproduction Luxembourg, France, Mexico and Norway - blends the harsh reality for a bunch of streetkids with something more mystical as they go on an, at times surreal, road trip in order to reclaim a patch of land.
The Silver Shell for Best Director went to Genki Kawamura's consideration of the impact of Alzheimer's on a strained mother and son relationship in A Hundred Flowers (Japan), while the Best Screenplay Award went to Dong Yun Zhou and Wang Chao for their work on the latter’s movie A Woman (China).
Young stars Carla Quílez and Paul Kircher landed the Silver Shell ex-aequo for Best Leading Performance in Pilar Palomero’s hybrd docufiction La Maternal (Spain) - a drama centered on teen pregannncy - and Christophe Honoré’sWinter Boy (France), which draws on the directors own experiences of the loss of his father.
In another indication of a new generation of stars coming through, 12-year-old Renata Lerman won the Best Supporting Performance for Diego Lerman’s The Substitute (Argentina-Spain-Italy-Mexico-France). Manuel Abramovich, the director of Pornomelancolía (Argentina-France-Brazil-Mexico), won the Best Cinematography Award for his work on this hybrid film, which considers a porn star's projection of 'himself' via social media, while the Special Jury Prize went to Runner, by the first-timer Marian Mathias (USA-Germany-France), “for the ambition of its narrative engagement, for its originality and for the intensity sensed in this first work”.
The Official Jury giving these awards was presided over by the producer Matías Mosteirín, who was accompanied by the jury members Antoinette Boulat, Tea Lindeburg, Rosa Montero, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese and Hlynur Pálmason.
Among the other awards was Spare Keys, a French film co-directed by Jeanne Aslan and Paul Saintillan, which won the Kutxabank-New Directors accolade, where another debut, On Either Sides of The Pond (India), by Parth Saurabh, earned a special mention. Tengo sueños eléctricos (Belgium-France-Costa Rica), the debut movie from Valentina Maurel, won the Horizontes Award, after taking home the Best Director, Best Actress and Best Actor awards at the Locarno Festival. For its part, the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Award was for Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland (Denmark-Iceland-France-Sweden), previously a participant in Un Certain Regard at Cannes.
The Nest Award went to the short film Blue Mountain, by Sofía Salinas and Juan David Bohórquez, from the Universidad Central de Colombia, and the section’s special mention to Anabase (Switzerland), by HEAD-Genève student Benjamin Goubet.
The winner of the Irizar Basque Film Award and FIPRESCI awards was Suro (Spain), Mikel Gurrea’s debut feature about tensions after a couple take over a cork farm and participant in the Official Selection, while the Basque Film special mention went to To Books and Women I Sing (Spain).
The audience award went to thriller Argentina, 1985 (Argentina-USA), the film by Santiago Mitre starring Ricardo Darin, while the Audience Award for Best European Film was won by The Beasts (Spain), directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen.
The festival closed with the world premiere of Marlowe, the latest movie by Neil Jordan, who was in San Sebastian together with two of its actors, Liam Neeson and Diane Kruger.
