Lourdes major winner at spectacular Viennale
The 2009 Viennale (October 22-November 4), described by its director, Hans Hurch, as "one of the most beautiful and successful editions we have ever held", drew to a miraculous close, with the triumph of Lourdes [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Jessica Hausner
film profile] by Austria’s Jessica Hausner. Co-produced by the director’s company Coop 99, France and Germany, the film stars Sylvie Testud.
Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at Venice, Lourdes received the Vienna Film Prize and won over the jury. The latter said they had "never seen anything like it before, at least not in such an aesthetic form! (...) It is a truly outstanding film experience about the unbelievable, hope and longing...".
The Vienna Film Prize which, for the first time this year, was split to honour both a narrative film and a documentary (with €14,000 for each of the winners), was awarded in the second category to Peter Kerekes’ Austrian/Czech/Slovakian co-production Cooking History. The film was described by the jury as "a perverted culinary feast of war, spiced with a pinch of sarcasm".
The Der Standard Readers’ Jury Award went to Iranian film About Elly and the FIPRESCI Prize to Chinese title Survival Song.
The festival drew a total of 94,800 viewers, representing an attendance level of 79.60% compared to 76.80% in 2008. For the same number of films (345 showings), the number of screenings sold out in advance rose to 124, i.e. over one third of screenings were full.
The festival’s new centre, the Badeschiff, took on its new role without problems, and attracted lots of visitors and activity.
Audiences were drawn in equal numbers to narrative films and documentaries and the Tilda Swinton homage was as much of a hit as expected. To the pleasant surprise of organisers, the archive section devoted to early Austrian cinema was a success, as was this year’s retrospective (on transgressive US comedies), which amassed 6,000 admissions. Hurch considers this success as "an incentive to continue following this distinctive path".
(Translated from French)
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