Ida has continued its winning streak by being voted as the winner of the eighth LUX Film Prize by members of the European Parliament.
The Polish-Danish co-production was announced as the winner against 2014’s other two finalists — Rok Bicek’s Class Enemy and Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood — during the parliamentary plenary session in Strasbourg today (Dec 17).
Speaking after accepting the award from the hands of European Parliament president Martin Schulz, Ida’s director Pawel Pawlikowski said the award came just three days after receiving the European Film 2014 statuette in Riga, “which, I suppose, makes it officially the most Europeanist of European films this year.”
He suggested that this was not so surprising given his personal biography and the fact that he had “somehow contrived to live and work in five different European countries in one lifetime.”
“Ida – a small black-and-white film, with unknown actors, with no musical score and a camera that doesn’t move – it actually sounds like every financier’s nightmare – and, yet, this film has managed to cross all European borders, reaching audiences from France to Hungary, from United Kingdom to Malta,” Pawlikowski recalled. “Which maybe proves that art still has a role to play in cinema today and the more personal, specific the film, the less rhetorical and calculating, the more universal its reach.”
Subtitled versions of the three finalists had been made available in 23 languages to screen in 28 countries as part of the LUX Film Days during November and December at such festivals as Thessaloniki, Santiago di Compostela, Cartagena, Seville, Vienna, and Bratislava as well as cinemas in cities as far apart as Edinburgh, Munich, Skopje, Helsinki, Lisbon, Barcelona, Valletta, Nicosia and Luxembourg.
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