Held in the northwestern city of Cluj Napoca, the Transylvania International Film Festival this year put the spotlight on South-American cinema. A production from Paraguay won the Grand Prize, namely Marcelo Martinessi\u2019s The Heiresses, which also won the Silver Bear trophy at the Berlin Film Festival this winter. Martinessi was handed the award by none other than the great Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu. According to a festival release, Marcelo Martinessi impressed the jury through his exceptional rigor and the captivating pace of his film, winning a competition in which 11 other very good films made the jury\u2019s task very difficult.<\/p>\n
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The jury made up of director Dagur Kari, casting director and filmmaker Stephane Foenkinos, script writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the actor Vlad Ivanov and the director Agnes Kocsis gave the award for best director to the Icelandic director Hlynur Palmason for his film Winter Brothers, which impressed through its \u201cpassion and cinematographic beauty and energy\u201d. Three of the actors playing in Anchor and Hope by the Spanish director Carlos Marques Marcet stood out for the \u201cexceptional way in which they complement each other on screen, with intelligence and charm, to create emotional roles full of humour\u201d, so the award for best actor went jointly to Natalia Tena, Oona Chaplin and David Verdaguer.<\/p>\n
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They received the trophy from the French-American actor Jean-Marc Barr, one of the festival\u2019s special guests. Two courageous productions won the Jury\u2019s Special Prize, Asghar Yousefinejad\u2019s The Home and Anna Kruglova\u2019s Scythe Hitting Stone. The FIPRESCI Prize, awarded by the International Federation of Film Critics, went to Ruth Mader\u2019s Life Guidance, a title shown in the section To be or not to be politically correct.<\/p>\n
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The audience award went to Gustav Moller\u2019s thriller The Guilty. The guest of honour of this year\u2019s festival, the French actor Fanny Ardant received a lifetime achievement award. Her acceptance speech was very emotional. The 50-year-long career of the ethnic-Hungarian Romanian actor Anna Szeles was also celebrated through a special prize. Last but not least, the Young Francophone Jury Prize given by TV5 Monde, the French Institute and RFI Romania went to Cedric Kahn\u2019s The Prayer for its \u201charmonious visual discourse, soundtrack and absorbing characters\u201d. (Translated by C. Mateescu)<\/p>\n
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The 17th edition of the Transylvania International Film Festival (TIFF) announced its winners on Sunday evening<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":77904,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37738],"tags":[30236,30412],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-77903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-today-in-the-news","tag-film-festival","tag-tiff"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n