03/11/2022 - Kurdwin Ayub’s feature debut Sonne scored the Vienna Film Award, while fellow Austrian Leni Lauritsch’s Rubikon received the Special Award of the Jury

(l-r) Sonne director Kurdwin Ayub, Viennale director Eva Sangiorgi and Rubikon director Leni Lauritsch (© Viennale/Alexi Pelekanos)

The 60^th Viennale concluded on 31 October with the awards ceremony and a screening of One Fine Morning [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Mia Hansen-Løve. The movie premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight earlier this year, where it won the Europa Cinemas Label Award for Best European Film.

As for the Viennale winners, Austrian director Kurdwin Ayub claimed another award for her feature film debut Sonne [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Kurdwin Ayub
film profile], the Vienna Film Award for the Best Austrian Film. The movie tells the story of three young women who become a popular musical act in the Viennese Kurdish community and are headed towards an interpersonal fallout. The jury congratulated Ayub on “skilfully managing to break with one or two clichés.” It is a film “worth seeing, entertaining, but also multi-layered and socio-politically relevant.”

The Special Award of the Jury went to fellow Austrian and feature film debut director Leni Lauritsch, and her sci-fi drama Rubikon [+see also:
film review
interview: Leni Lauritsch
film profile]. The movie grapples with a futuristic dystopian scenario in which the uneasy question has to be asked: do we save ourselves or others? The jury applauded Lauritsch on her bravery in shooting a genre film as her first project and commented that “it is remarkable how many narrative levels and philosophical questions are interwoven in this film.”

The Erste Bank MehrWERT Award was split between two short films. The jury justified this decision by the fact that both of these films tackle two of the most fundamental areas of the human experience: sex and death. The first winner was Eve Heller with Singing in Oblivion, which uses observational photography and found images to evoke a meditation on death and memory in the Jewish Cemetery in Vienna, which was partially destroyed by the Nazis and is now left to decay. The second award went to Jan Soldat for Blind Date, for showing the immaterial aspects of human experience and its physical manifestations, in this case, desire and the body.

The award of the DER STANDARD Reader Jury is dedicated to a film that does not yet have a distributor in Austria and for which a cinema release in Austria is particularly recommended. This year, it was the Ukrainian-French-Chilean-Luxembourgian-German co-production Pamfir [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk
interview: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk
film profile] by Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk. The jury called it a movie that “drove into our bones and we left the screening quite dazed and excited about what we had just seen.” It centres on a man returning to his remote small Ukrainian hometown and the conflicts he is confronted with.

The FIPRESCI Award went to the Swiss Unrest [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Cyril Schäublin
film profile] by Cyril Schäublin, his second feature which like Ayub’s Sonne has already collected its share of awards. The jury lauded it for “its depiction of an original international atmosphere in a small place, for its questioning of our understanding of history and for seeing watchmaking through a prism of history.”

Overall, the festival proclaimed the special anniversary edition a success. 73,700 people attended the Viennale between 20 October and 1 November, which corresponds to an occupancy rate of 71 percent. "This 60^th edition was a celebration of cinema and togetherness," festival director Eva Sangiorgi stated. "We all felt it, in the energy of the full cinema halls, in the vivid conversations between authors and audience, in the expressions of all those people with whom we have shared so many experiences through the films.”

Here is the full list of winners:

Vienna Film Award for Best Austrian Film
Sonne [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Kurdwin Ayub
film profile] - Kurdwin Ayub (Austria)

Special Award of the Jury
Rubikon [+see also:
film review
interview: Leni Lauritsch
film profile] - Leni Lauritsch (Austria)

Viennale Award of the DER STANDARD Reader Jury
Pamfir [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk
interview: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk
film profile] - Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk (Ukraine/France/Chile/Luxembourg/Germany)

FIPRESCI Award
Unrest [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Cyril Schäublin
film profile] - Cyril Schäublin (Switzerland)

Erste Bank MehrWERT Award
Singing in Oblivion - Eve Heller (Austria) (short film)
Blind Date - Jan Soldat (Austria/Germany) (short film)