First edition of pan-European online festival is a joint initiative between Arte and Festival Scope.

A Good Wife

Serbian actress and director Mirjana Karanović’s A Good Wife has won the €50,000 audience award at the first edition of ArteKino, a new pan-European online film festival launched by Franco-German broadcaster Arte and Paris-based digital film platform Festival Scope.

Running September 30 to October 9, the event showcased 10 European feature films. The organisers released 50,000 free online tickets in 44 European countries.

A Good Wife marks a directorial debut for Karanović who also stars in the film as a happily-married woman living in an upscale suburb of Belgrade whose life is overturned on discovering her perfect husband has a dark past.

The film was produced by This & That Productions, Deblokada, Nukleus Film Production and is sold internationally by Films Boutique.

The €50,000 prize money – sponsored by Nespresso - goes to Karanović and Film Boutique to help distribute the film internationally.

A Good Wife premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to screen at 15 other festivals including Göteborg, Vilnius, Munich, Karlovy Vary, Melbourne and Sarajevo.

It won the White Iris for best first film at the Brussels Film Festival and the FIPRESCI prize the Motovun Film Festival.

The other titles in the festival included Greek director Argyris Papadimitropoulos’s Suntan, Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra’s festival hit The Death Of Louis XIV, and Philippe Faucon’s contemporary immigrant drama Fatima, which won best film at the French Césars earlier this year.