26/01/2007

Two multiple-award winning films can add yet another festival to their list: Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will won the Trieste Prize for Best Feature Film (and the accompanying €5,000) at the 18th edition of the Trieste Film Festival (January 18-25) while a Special Mention went to Polish title Retrieval [+see also:
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The feature competition jury of the festival – which is dedicated almost entirely to Eastern European cinema, a fitting tradition given Trieste’s history and significantly large Slavic population – found that Glasner’s film tells “the story of a man who is slave to his own nature…with dramatic incisiveness and without any compromise. The film director does not indulge in easy solutions and preserves an objective detachment, helped by two extraordinary actors”.

The documentary competition award (€2,500) went to Swedish director Agnieszka Lukasiak’s Forgotten (Bortglömda), which follows two women who leave a Polish collective labour camp, one of many such abandoned farms from the Communist era, in their difficult search for a better life in Warsaw.

Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s The Tube With a Hat (Lampa cu caciula), another successful title at festivals worldwide, won the short film competition and €2,000.

However, the hands-down favourite feature among audiences was established Croatian director Rajko Grlic’s Karaula, an adaptation of a popular, bittersweet novel on Yugoslavian soldiers stationed along the Albanian border just months before the country’s fall and the first project of any kind to be co-financed by all of the countries of the former Yugoslavia, along with Germany.

The Audience Awards for Best Short and Best Documentary went to The Tube With a Hat and Alen Drljevic’s Bosnian film Karneval, respectively.