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FESTIVALS Spain / USA

Blancanieves is belle of ball at Palm Springs

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- The inaugural Cine Latino award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival went to its opening film, Blancanieves

The 24th edition of the Palm Springs Film Festival came to an end this weekend in eponymous California desert town with its traditional awards brunch.

The festival has made an effort in further highlighting its many Latino films across all its sections, opening this year with Spain's Foreign Language Oscar submission, Blancanieves [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pablo Berger
film profile
]
from director Pablo Berger.

The film went on to win the festival's inaugural Cine Latino Award for best Ibero-American production. The Cine Latino jury gave an honourable mention to Sadourni's Butterflies, directed by Argentinean director Darío Nardi. Coincidentally, both films are in black and white, in Spanish - though Blancanieves is a silent film with intertitles - and feature a little person as one of the main characters.

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The jury of the festival's competitive strand for up and coming filmmakers, the New Voices/New Visions section, also decided to honour two Spanish-language films: The Cleaner from Peru won the New Voices/New Visions award, while the Paraguayan film 7 Boxes got an honourable mention.

The Fipresci jury, which awards films from among the 40+ Foreign Language Oscar submissions that screen at the festival, gave their Fipresci Prize for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year to Rama Burshtein's delicate Israeli drama Fill the Void, which premiered in Venice.

The Fipresci acting prizes went to European productions: Cosimo Rega, Salvatore Striano and Giovanni Arcuri were crowned Best Actor for their performances in the prison docu-drama Caesar Must Die [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
film profile
]
from Italy's the Taviani brothers. Belgian star Emilie Dequenne was crowned Best Actress for her role as the mother in the infanticide-themed Our Children [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Joachim Lafosse
film profile
]
from Joachim Lafosse. The actress won the same award in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes, where the film premiered.

Further prizes included the John Schlesinger Award, which went to the documentary Stolen Seas, a Somalia-Kenya-UK-Italy co-production, and the HP Bridging the Borders Award, which went to Ireland-UK co-production Jump.

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