Graham Foy’s The Maiden has won Venice’s Giornate degli Autori (GdA) Cinema of the Future award.
The Canadian-US film was among seven titles from the GdA sidebar, all first or second features, competing for the €3,000 prize.
Foy’s debut follows three suburban teenagers whose lives are intertwined when one of them disappears and strange occurrences begin cropping up.
The jury was made up of five students from an Italian film school who said: “The film impressed us with its emotional density and the immediacy of its unrestrained, personal style, along with its ability to portray a loss as a subjective, poetic experience instead of the drama it objectively is.”
The Maiden is produced by FF Films’ Daiva Zalnieriunas and MDFF’s Dan Montgomery. Celluloid Dreams are handling international sales.
Other prizes
GdA’s people’s choice award went to UK filmmaker Georgia Oakley’s debut Blue Jean about a closeted PE teacher during 1970’s Thatcherism.
The film won 65% of the votes from GdA audiences, followed closely by Dirty Difficult Dangerous from Wissam Charaf and The Damned Don’t Cry by Fyzal Boulifa.
Cláudia Varejão’s Wolf And Dog took home the GdA director’s award of €20,000 to be split equally between herself and the film’s distributor, France’s MPM Premium.
Paying homage to São Miguel’s queer community, the film centres around a young girl whose best friend, a boy, likes to wear dresses and another friend from Canada who brings with her ”the glowing days of youth”.
The jury featured 27 young European film enthusiasts and was headed by French filmmaker Céline Sciamma. Karlovy Vary International Film Festival artistic director Karel Och oversaw the deliberations.
Explaining their decision, the jury said: “The immersive world created in the film allowed us to engage in the important subject matter, presenting the queer characters as they are in their safe space. We found that the documentary-like elements contributed to the effectiveness and authenticity of the storytelling.”
Wolf And Dog’s producers were João Matos of Portugal’s Terratreme Filmes and Jérôme Blesson of Frances’s La Belle Affaire Productions.
Europa Cinemas award
Charaf’s Dirty Difficult Dangerous was awarded with the Europa Cinemas Label.
The Lebanese film, which opened the programme, entwines multiple love stories against the backdrop of Lebanon’s near collapse and stars Clara Couturent, Ziad Jallad, Rifaat Tarabey and Darina Al Joundi.
European cinemas will now receive financial incentives from Europa Cinema if they include Dirty Difficult Dangerous in their programming.
This is Charaf’s second feature film, following 2016 Cannes Acid title Heaven Sent, and is produced by Aurora Films. The co-producers are Intramovies, which also handles international sales on the title, and Né à Beyrouth Films.
The jury, who selected the “very original and surprisingly uplifting film”, comprised Michèle Creemers (Cinecenter, Amsterdam, The Netherlands); Marco Fortunato (Cinemazero, Pordenone, Italy); Hristo Hristozov (Dom na Kinoto, Sofia, Bulgaria) and Zacharias Ioannidis-Varvaressos (Cine Paradisos, Korydallos, Greece).
Previous winners of the Europa Cinema Label include Ivan Ikić’s Oasis and Californe by Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman.
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