14/11/2016 - Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Heartstone has taken home its second international festival prize within a week at CPH PIX, which wrapped on 10 November

Director Ralitza Petrova with her New Talent Grand Pix Award (© Yann Houlberg Andersen/CPH PIX)

Bulgarian director Ralitza Petrova’s feature debut, Godless [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ralitza Petrova
film profile], collected its 19^th international festival trophy when it was awarded the CPH PIX €10,000 New Talent Grand Pix Award at Copenhagen’s Pumpehuset on 10 November; the prize is intended to help her new film project to get off the ground.

After its fusion with the Buster International Children’s Film Festival, and unspooling for the first time in the autumn instead of April, CPH PIX had a record number of 226 films on show, including ten contenders for the first-feature prize.

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Last month (8 October), the Bulgarian-Danish-French production bagged the Golden Puffin top prize at Iceland’s Reykjavik International Film Festival; at the Locarno International Film Festival, it received four awards, including the Golden Leopard for Best Film. 

Currently competing at Sweden’s Stockholm Film Festival, the film, also scripted by Petrova, stars Bulgarian actress Irena Ivanova as a nurse who traffics the ID cards of patients with dementia on the black market for identity thefts, driven by the lure of easy money and an addiction to morphine.

“We were looking for a filmmaker and a talent who is not afraid to grab the world with the possibilities of cinema itself and use all its means to invite us inside this process. In this kind of cinema, there is no hierarchy: a scene involving eating soup is shot with the same intensity as a scene with a sex orgy. That is why we have decided to award the prize to this daring and interesting voice whose future films we are looking forward to looking out for,” said the international jury, comprising French director Philippe Grandrieux, Swedish producer Erika Wasserman and Danish cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro.

Icelandic director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s feature debut, Heartstone [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
film profile], is also on a winning streak: earlier this month (5 November), it left the Nordic Film Days in Lübeck with German pubcaster NDR’s €12,500 award (read the news), and in Copenhagen, the Danish-Icelandic production took home the Audience Award.

Swedish director Alexandra-Therese Keining’s Girls Lost [+see also:
trailer
film profile] was named Best Children’s Film (from the Buster programme); also scripted by Keining, it follows three teenage girls who are bullied by their companions, and who discover a curious plant – when they drink its nectar, they are temporarily transformed into boys.

Here is the full list of Copenhagen’s CPH PIX 2016 award winners:

New Talent Grand Pix
Godless [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ralitza Petrova
film profile] – Ralitza Petrova (Bulgaria/Denmark/France) 

Best Children’s Film (The Nordisk Film Fund’s Award)
Girls Lost [+see also:
trailer
film profile] – Alexandra-Therese Keining (Sweden/Finland) 

Best Short Film for Children (from the Politiken Fund)
Ztriwer – Amalie Næsby (Denmark)

Audience Award (from the Politiken daily)
Heartstone [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
film profile] – Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson (Iceland/Denmark)