Persistent imagefrom the Catalan director Laura Ferresrose with golden thorn 68th International Film Week in Valladolid (Seminci), a feature film Chimerafrom Italian Alice Rohrwacherwon the Silver Spike, according to a Palmares Festival announcement published this Saturday.

The festival’s winning film represents a “logical continuation” of the career of Laura Ferres, who won Critics’ Week Goya, Gaudí and Cannes for her short film Los deshederados (2017), a work halfway between a documentary and a fiction about the bankruptcy of his father’s company that premiered in the official section “62 Seminchi”.

“The Permanent Image,” inspired by her mother’s Andalusian family, unfolds as a story within another story in which Carmen, a publicist searching for “real” faces for a campaign, encounters Antonia, a woman. who emigrated to Catalonia several decades ago and with whom she developed a special relationship. Carlos Vermouth and Ulises Porra are also collaborating on a script for this kind of melodrama about finding one’s roots, with non-professional actors and not without a touch of absurd humor.

The international jury, which included Spanish director Meritchel Colell, British producer Mike Goodridge, Indian director Pan Nalin, director Cayman Cuadernos de Cine Jara Yañez and Argentine director, producer and teacher Ivan Granovsky, awarded the Silver Thorn to Chimera, Alice’s fourth feature film. Rohrwacher.

The Italian director returns with this work to one of the portraits of deep Italy, in this case the eighties, through the story of archaeological thieves and lost love with Isabella Rossellini in the cast. Rohrwacher focuses on the constants of his filmography to offer a fable with a Fellinian spirit, a vitalistic song that captures the beauty of the Tuscan countryside.

According to the award certificate, the film “evokes magical feelings, pushing the boundaries of the artistic form of cinema, through a gaze that enchantingly perceives life and death, people and spirits, often dissolving the line between reality and fantasy.”

For her part, German director Angela Schanelec won the Ribera del Duero Award for Best Director for “Music,” a film that also won Best Cinematography for Ivan Markovic for its “minimalist, detached and elliptical” style.”

Briton Molly Manning Walker, in Valladolid following her triumph in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, has now won the Pilar Miro Award for best new direction for How to Have Sex, in which she explores sexual consent through a group of British teenagers on holiday in Greece.

In the acting department, there were wins for established actress and emerging actress, with Léa Seydoux winning Best Actress for Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, a genre crossover in which she offers multiple plates in three looks. are in different eras, and Dave Turner, a firefighter and hotelier by profession, until Ken Loach cast him in supporting roles in I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry, We Missed You (2019) ), he was awarded the Best Actor award for the film “El Viejo Roble”.

Veterans

Another veteran, Marco Bellocchio, was awarded the Miguel Delibes Award for best screenplay, a new indictment of the establishment based on the true story of the papacy’s kidnapping of a Jewish child at the height of Italian reunification.

The José Salcedo Award for Best Editing went to Germany’s Gese Jäger for Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Room, whose shot selection reflects the film’s own concept, a kaleidoscope of the tensions of modern society that thrives and grows from petty theft. At school.

The International Critics’ Awards (Fipresci) welcomed the debut of the Spanish Victor Iriarte in fiction with the film “Sobre todo en noche”, which examines the trauma of stolen babies through the epistolary chronicle of two women who are given the lives of Ana Torrent and Lola Dueñas, in which he freely mixes different silent and classic film resources for a journey through the country’s recent history.

Veteran Ken Loach’s “Old Oak” was the crowd favorite, who with their votes and score of 4.73 out of five decided to award the prize, sponsored by El Norte de Castilla, to an old acquaintance. festival

Meeting point

The top award for Punto de Encuentro went to Gasoline Rainbow by brothers Bill and Turner Ross, directors with distinguished and award-winning careers as documentary filmmakers, and Sarah Summa’s Arthur and Diana, a road movie between Berlin and Paris, received a special award, and Sofia Exarchu’s Animal received a special mention.

Rima Maya’s Night Burger won the award for best foreign short film in this section, with a special mention going to Emma Axelrud Bernard’s Coeurs Brisés Hôtel, and the La Noche del Corto Español winner was Meteor. , Victor Moreno.

The young jury of this section awarded the film “One Last Evening” by German Lukas Natrat “for its realistic presentation of the problems of youth and its consideration of topics such as toxic relationships.”

First prize in the Time of History category went to Between Revolutions, based on archival images by Romanian director Vlad Petri, while Portraits of Ghosts earned Kleber Mendonça Filho second prize in this category and a DOC award. Spain lost to Oscar Alegria’s Zinzindurruncarratz.

Morgana Frund’s Ours was chosen as the best short film in this section, and the History Time Audience Award received a 4.6 out of five, while Asmé El Mudir’s The Mother of All Lies is an inventive and personal look with artistic intent at the unrest in Casablanca 1981.

Other awards

The Golden Thorn for a short film went to Nina Ganz’s film “Wander in Wonders”, and Marina Alberti, the granddaughter of the legendary poet Rafael Alberti and the writer Maria Teresa Leon, received a Silver Thorn for the memory film “Aitan”. to his mother.

The short film candidate for the 2024 EFA Valladolid is “Le Mal des ardents” by the Frenchwoman Alice Brigaud, while “King of the Week” by David Pérez Sañudo was the best in the “Short Films of Castile and León” section in the category “Short Films Before Trial”. jury.

A rainbow spike of 68 seminchi, failed by Oliva Cachafeiro Bernal, Alejandro Cano Sanz and David Lagunilla Infante, fell to Andrew Hay’s Unknowns. Also given a special mention was the “boldness, freshness and originality” of the Spanish film On the Road by Julia de Castro and Maria Giselle Royo.

The “Green Thorn” of the 68th edition was awarded to the feature film “Muyeres”, the debut film of Marta Lallana, in which the beauty of the Asturian Mountains is explored with a sensitivity filled with poetry, with composer and producer Raoul Refri as the protagonist and author of the film. soundtrack.

In addition, Anna Llargues’ short film “Trenc D’Alba” received a special mention from the jury consisting of University of Malaga journalism professor Ruth de Frutos, Greenpeace employee and producer Catalina Jiménez and Environmentalists in Action member Luis Rico García-Amado.