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FESTIVALS Bulgaria

For My Father gets Sofia acclaim

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Dror Zahavi’s Israeli/German co-production For My Father [+see also:
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topped the 13th edition of the Sofia International Film Festival, which came to a close Saturday night in the Bulgarian capital’s National Palace of Culture. The International Competition jury, chaired by Hungarian director Janos Szasz, awarded the film the €5,000 Grand Prix for being “exceptional in dealing with impossible love between humor and humanism”.

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Another big winner of the night proved to be Bulgaria’s Oscar submission, Zift [+see also:
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by Javor Gardev, which claimed both the Special Jury Award – offered by the Bulgarian National Film Center for being “the first Bulgarian noir film” – and the Kodak Award for the Best Bulgarian Film of the Year.

Radu Jude’s The Happiest Girl in the World [+see also:
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, previous winner of the CICAE Award in this year’s Berlinale Panorama, got the FIPRESCI Award, while Takeshi Kitano’s Achilles and the Tortoise charmed the Bulgarian public and went home with the Audience Award.

Wim Wenders, a regular at SIFF, was special guest of the night, and made a show when he presented Andrey Paunov and Boris Despodov with the Jameson Award for the Best Bulgarian Short Film for their Three Sisters and Andrey. Wenders closed the festival yesterday with the Bulgarian premiere of his latest feature, The Palermo Shooting [+see also:
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The Lifetime Achievement honours of this year’s Sofia Film Fest went to British actor-screenwriter-television host Michael Palin and Bulgarian director Nikola Korabov.

SIFF 2009 screened 262 films and welcomed 228 foreign guests, most of them also part of the Sofia Meetings.

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