French filmmaker Jonathan Millet’s thriller Ghost Trail won El Gouna Film Festival’s $50,000 Golden Star award for best narrative film. The fest
French filmmaker Jonathan Millet’s thriller Ghost Trail won El Gouna Film Festival’s $50,000 Golden Star award for best narrative film. The festival ran October 24-November 1.
Lead Adam Bessa also won best actor for his performance as a newborn man on a mission to track Syrian regime leaders in France, where he must confront his former torturer. The film world premiered at Cannes’ Critics’ Week sidebar.
The $25,000 Silver Star award went to Julien Colonna’s war drama The Kingdom, while Indian romantic drama Girls Will be Girls by Shuchi Talati won the $15,000 Bronze Star and the Fipresci award.
The latter world premiered at the Sundance Film festival, winning the audience award and the jury special award for best acting for Preeti Panigrahi.
Best actress went to Laura Weissmahr for her performance in Mar Coll’s Spanish psychodrama Salve Maria, as a up-to-date mother going through the complexities of motherhood.
Best Arab narrative feature was shared by Palestinian filmmaker Laila Abbas’ drama Thank You For Banking With Us! and Tunisian filmmaker Meryam Joobeur’s drama Who Do I Belong To, which world premiered in competition at the Berlinale.
The jury also gave a special mention to actor Charles Peccia Galletto for his performance in Anne-Sophie Bailly’s drama My Everything.
15 films were screened in this year’s feature narrative competition. The jury was headed by Indian actress and filmmaker Nandita Das, and also included French film critic Charles Tesson, Egyptian actress Menna Shalaby, German actress Sibel Kekilli, and Algerian filmmaker Sofia Djama.
Documentary competition
In the feature documentary competition, Lebanese filmmaker Farah Kassem’s We Are Inside won the $30,000 El Gouna Golden Star for best feature documentary. The film follows the complicated relationship between Farah and her ageing Father, and how poetry helps them communicate.
There were 12 feature documentary contenders. Lebanese director and producer Eliane Raheb presided over the jury which also featured French producer Jérôme Paillard, Tunisian actor and director Nejib Belkadhi, German director Steffi Niederzoll, and Moroccan director and producer Hicham Falah.
The $15,000 Silver Star went to Belgium filmmaker Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack To A Coup d’Etat, which explores the utilize of jazz music as a tool of U.S. diplomacy during the Cold War. It premiered at Sundance.
The $7,500 El Gouna Bronze Star went to Norwegian filmmaker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s A New Kind Of Wilderness, a story of a Norwegian family seeks a wild free existence but a tragic turn of events shatters their isolation.
The $10,000 prize for best Arab documentary feature was shared by Egyptian filmmakers Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir’s The Brink Of Dreams, the winner of the best documentary award at Cannes Critics’ Week, and Syrian filmmaker Anas Zawahri’s My Memory Is Full Of Ghosts, which follows weary residents in Syria striving for normalcy.
The festival’s $20,000 cinema for humanity award – for films exploring humanitarian issues – went to the Lebanese shadowy comedy drama Disorder by Lucien Bourjeily, Bane Fakih, Wissam Charaf, and Areej Mahmoud.
In other awards, the NetPac award went to We Are Inside by Lebanese filmmaker Farah Kassem, while The Battle For Laikipia by Peter Murimi and Daphne Matziaraki from Kenya won the $10,000 El Gouna Green Star award, for films that raise awareness around issues related to the environment, ecology or wildlife.
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