10/04/2006

Austria’s Wolfgang Murnberger and his feature Silentium [+see also:
trailer
film profile] won the top prize on Sunday at the 24th edition of the Detective Film Festival at Cognac.

Presented in the Panorama section at the 2005 Berlinale and pre-selected at the European Film Awards, with a cast that includes Josef Hader, Simon Schwarz, Joachim Krol and Maria Köstlinger, the film tells the story of a private detective’s investigations in Salzburg’s bourgeois circles after the suspicious suicide of the opera director’s son-in-law.

Adapted from a novel by Wolf Haas, in which cases of paedophilia abuse in religious institutions and the trafficking of young immigrants are intertwined, Silentium was produced by Dor Film and is being sold internationally by Sola Media GmbH.

It is also worth noting the filmmaker’s success with Lapislazuli (see news), which he co-directed in 2006 with Elisabeth Scharang.

Presided over by US director Jonathan Demme, the jury also awarded a prize to the Swedish/German/Norwegian co-production by Denmark’s Peter Flinth, Mastermind, with a cast that includes Krister Henriksson, Johanna Sällström and Ola Rapace.

Inspired by the adventures of Inspector Kurt Wallander, the hero from the novels of well-known Swedish novelist Henning Mankell, the feature film about the search for a psychopath was awarded the Grand Prix of the Jury. Produced by Yellow Bird Productions (Sweden), with backing from the SFI, Mastermind received co-production funding from TV4, ARD/Degeto Film GmbH and the Swedish regional funds Film i Skåne, in cooperation with Canal +, DR, TV2 Norge, MTV3, Tobis Film GmbH and Svensk Filmindustri AB, who is also handling international sales.

Lastly, the Critic’s Prize went to Iceland filmmaker Baltasar Kormatur’s A Little Trip To Heaven [+see also:
trailer
film profile], an Iceland/US co-production starring Forest Whitaker. International sales are being handled by Katapult Film Sales.

(Translated from French)