Published on Cineuropa.org by Davide Abbatescianni
The Award for Best Film in the European Short Competition went to Carla Melo Gampert’s The Bitch, whilst Agata Tracevič’s Plica Polonica was crowned Best Lithuanian Short.
The 21st edition of the European Film Forum Scanorama opened on 9 November with a screening of The Taste of Things by Trần Anh Hùng, and wrapped on 19 November with the national premiere of the first Lithuanian 3D feature film, titled Twittering Soul and helmed by Lithuanian sculptor-turned-director Deimantas Narkevicius. The festival was held in Lithuania’s four biggest cities — Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipėda and Šiauliai — and in the smaller towns of Alytus and Visaginas.
This year’s top prize went to Stepne by Maryna Vroda (Ukraine/Germany/Poland/Slovakia), the winner in the festival’s feature-film competition and collecting a €7,000 award. “The film creates space and time for the audience to experience the story subtly and tenderly, bridging collective and individual memories. Revealing the story of a son coming home to his dying mother in a remote Ukrainian village, the film opens up the funeral, gathering the last few village inhabitants. Thanks to its insightful and almost tactile gaze in her debut feature, the director reminds us that history is made of personal stories,” said jury president and managing director of the Austrian Film Academy Katharina Albrecht-Stadler. The other jurors were filmmakers Mitra Farahani and Isabelle Stever.
This year, more than half of the films included in the feature film competition were helmed by women. The other films in competition included the likes of Here by Bas Devos (Belgium), Family Time by Tia Kouvo (Sweden/Finland), Sweet Dreams by Ena Sendijarevič (Netherlands/Sweden), Amor by Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri (Italy/Lithuania), Solitude by Ninna Pálmadóttir (Iceland/Slovakia) and Kalak by Isabella Eklöf (Denmark/Sweden/Greenland/Norway/Netherlands/Finland).
Next, the Award for Best Film in the Scanorama European Short Film Competition “Glimpses of Europe” went to Carla Melo Gampert, director of the animated film The Bitch (France/Colombia), collecting a €5,000 award. Meanwhile, the Award for Best Lithuanian Short Film was bestowed upon Agata Tracevič’s Plica Polonica, awarded €3,000.
This year, Scanorama showcased some outstanding European hits including Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos, The Eternal Daughter by Joanna Hogg, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World by Radu Jude, MMXX by Cristi Puiu, Anselm by Wim Wenders, Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert by Margarethe von Trotta, and Daaaaaali! by Quentin Dupieux, among others.
“Cinema is an inclusive art that draws on reality, and can represent current European issues in an artistically compelling way. Thus, ecological accents, the ever-growing discourse of sustainability in society, reflection on colonial legacy, the stigmas of social minorities, migrants and their integration, the transformation of women’s roles in society at various points in history, and the revision of attitudes, responsibilities, and values naturally make their way into the cinema’s field of vision. Scanorama, now in its third decade of existence, shuns the declarative denominator of a single theme and relies on both focal points of today’s artists and time-tested tradition of classics,” commented Grazina Arlickaite, the festival’s founder and artistic director.
Among other highlights of this year’s edition was the retrospective focusing on famous film directors’ works in TV such as Christian Petzold’s Cuba Libre, Béla Tarr’s Macbeth, Lars von Trier’s Medea and Agnès Varda’s Nausicaa, as well as screenings of Georgian female directors’ film prints (unexpectedly discovered in the Lithuanian film archive) including Liana Eliava’s Cinema (1977), Lana Gogoberidze’s Day is Longer than Night (1983) and Nana Dzordzadze’s My English Grandfather (1987), winner of the Caméra d’Or at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.
