Japanese film About the Pink Sky wins top prize in Gijón

by Gonzalo Suárez

24/11/2012 - Atiq Rahimi’s French-Afghan The Patience Stone wins three awards at the 50th edition of the Asturias film festival, with awards divided between Asian and European productions

Asia and Europe ended up sharing the main awards at the Gijón International Film Festival. The grand winner of this 50th edition of the festival, and the first to be directed by Nacho Carballo, was Japanese director Keiichi Kobayashi’s feature debut About the Pink Sky. Despite it provoking very little praise after its screening, the jury made up of Dmitry Glujovsky, Ernesto Alterio, Lola Salvador, José Salcedo, and Farid Bozorgmehr ended up choosing this film in black and white and its quite bizarre storyline: A teenager will have to fight against her pessimism to get a newspaper going, after handing back a wallet to its attractive owner. Best Director also went to the Far East, with South Korean director Lee Sang-Woo winning it for Barbie.

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The films that received the most awards were Franco-Afghan film The Patience Stone [+see also:
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film profile] (read the review), which won the FIPRESCI Prize and Young Jury Prize, as well as Best Actress (Golshifteh Farahani), and Israeli film Epilogue, which won Best Actor (Yosef Carmon) and Best Screenplay. The screenplay was written by the film’s director Amir Manor (watch the interview).