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FESTIVALS Portugal

Canijo and Pêra triumph at Caminhos do Cinema Português

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Scooping four gongs, Blood of My Blood [+see also:
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was one of the main winners at the Caminhos do Cinema Português Festival (“Paths of Portuguese Cinema”), the only event dedicated exclusively to domestic cinema, which takes place in the city of Coimbra. This suburban melodrama, released in theatres in October, won the festival’s Grand Prize, as well as three other awards: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (both for João Canijo) and Best Actress (Rita Blanco).

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The prizes are a national recognition for a film selected at several international events (San Sebastian, Toronto, Rio de Janeiro, Tallinn, Turin…) and which also became the best-performing national production of 2011, with 18,207 viewers and €85,691 in box-office takings, according to figures from the Film and Audiovisual Institute.

Edgar Pêra’s The Baron also picked up four awards, in the categories of Best Make-Up (Jorge Bragada), Best Editing (Tiago Antunes), Best Cinematography (Luís Branquinho) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Luísa Costa Gomes and Pêra). The film, based on the work of Branquinho de Brandão, is a remake in expressionist and gothic tone of a film made in the 1940s, which was banned by the dictatorship because it depicts a tyrant, a Baron, who terrorises the inhabitants of a mountainous region.

Sérgio Tréfaut, known above all for the documentary Lisboetas (“Lisboans”), won Best Feature for his fiction debut Journey to Portugal. The film also earned veteran thesp Isabel Ruth the Best Supporting Actress Award for her role as a border control officer in an airport.

There were no surprises in the documentary category, with the victory going to Miguel Gonçalves Mendes’s José and Pilar [+see also:
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]
. This film about Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer José Saramago and his wife, Spanish journalist Pilar del Río, was recently shown at New York’s MOMA and is Portugal’s entry in the race for the 2012 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Finally, João Nuno Pinto’s debut feature, America [+see also:
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film profile
]
, won the Revelation Prize and Best Actor Award (for Fernando Luís).

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(Translated from Spanish)

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