27/11/2006

The successful 47th Thessaloniki International Film Festival closed, after a week of a record-breaking 300 films and packed venues, with Alain Resnais’ Silver Lion winning film Private Fears in Public Places [+see also:
trailer
film profile], but not before several European (co)productions walked away with some of the event’s most prestigious awards.

Although the biggest winner of the evening was Kim Tae-yong’s South Korean film Family Ties – which swept up the majority of the night’s top honours, including the Golden Alexander for Best Film and the Best Actress prize for its four stars (Moon So-ri, Goh Doon-shim, Kong Hyo-jin and Kim Hae-ok) – it shared the ex-aequo Best Screenplay prize with the Brazilian/ German/Portuguese/French co-production Suely in the Sky [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Karim Ainouz (see news). The latter also picked up a prize for Artistic Achievement and the FIPRESCI award for a film in international competition.

Poland’s Slawomir Fabicki received the Best Director award for Retrieval [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] while the intense performance of the film’s star, Antoni Pawlicki, was singled out for the Best Actor award.

The FIPRESCI award for the best film in the Greek Films 2006 section went to Angeliki Antoniou’s Eduart (Greece/Germany), which stirred up some of the greatest buzz at the festival.

The Audience Awards went to Family Ties (International Competition), Dimitris Koutsiabassakos’s domestic drama The Guardian’s Son (Yios tou fylaka) (Greece 2006) and festival circuit veteran 12:08 East of Bucharest [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Corneliu Porumboiu
interview: Daniel Burlac
film profile] by Corneliu Porumboiu (Balkan Survey).

Land of Nod by Evangelos Yiovannis won the Digital Alexander in the newly established Greek Digital Wave section while the Crossroads Co-Production Forum award (which consists of €10,000 in development money) went to the work in progress Pandora’s Box by Turkish filmmaker Yesim Ustaoglu.

Other top prizes include the international jury’s Special Jury prize, to Iranian film On a Friday Afternoon by Mona Zandi Haghighi, and the Hellenic Parliament’s Human Values prize to the multi-award winning The Violin by Mexico’s Francisco Vargas.