31st Venice International Film Critics' Week Award Winners

As Venezia73 starts to slide into the sunset, the collateral sections start to announce their awards winners; the following are two award winners in Settimana Internazionale della Critica.

Premio Mario Serandrei – Hotel Saturnia Award:   Akher Wahed Fina (The Last of Us) by Ala Eddine Slim (Tunisia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Lebanon)

From this year on and together with the Audience Award, the Venice International Film Critics’ Week decided to also give a prize for the best technical contribution, named after the great editor Mario Serandrei. The jury, composed by the film critics’ Franco Montini (president of the National Union of Italian Film Critics’), Adriano De Grandis and Piero Spila gave the Mario Serandrei – Hotel Saturnia Award for the Best Technical Contribution to The Last of Us for “the admirable photography of Amine Messadi and the decisive contribution of Moncef Taleb and Yazid Chabbi for the sound, that constitute a real alternative to narration in a film without dialogues, thanks to which The Last of Us (Akher Wahed Fina) by Ala Eddine Slim carries out an original existential road movie, between ghostly intuitions and an almost abstract description of reality”.

“A confirmation and a restart. The cinema at Venice Critic’s Week is alive and kicking” says Giona Nazzaro, general delegate of the Venice International Film Critics’ Week “characterized by a generous affluence of audience and a great attention by national and international press, this edition of Critics’ Week awards the urgency of living and making cinema, a young cinema which is in tune with the world. Juan Sebastián Mesa and Ala Eddine Slim are two filmmakers that revealed themselves to the audience with an unmistakable and radical gaze. Two filmmakers that are rooted in the present and projected towards the future”.



Audience Award - Circolo del Cinema di Verona:  Los Nadie by Juan Sebastián Mesa (Colombia)

Seventeen years after the victory of Mondo Grúa, the film that revealed the talent of Argentinean Pablo Trapero, Latin America triumphs again in the Venice International Film Critics’ Week thanks to the Colombian film winner of the Circolo del Cinema di Verona Audience Award of this 31st edition.

Los Nadie tells the story of five friends who, during their late adolescence full of intense restlessness, astonishment, unexpressed tenderness and manifested rage, survive in the margins of Medellín: a city that attracts and excludes at the same time, a city that seduce them with their promises but also pushes them away with hostility. Music, street art and friendship are their weapons of resistance in the hope of a rite of passage that is able to transform them in something different.

“This is a film – says Mesa – that speaks about a generation of disenchanted dreamers that feel the need to embrace the unknown and to explore the world by themselves, in order to escape from the problems and the violence that surrounds them on a daily basis”, offering at the same time a portray of “a movement, the anarcho-punks, which is one of the most enigmatic and radical movements of our time”.

Shot only in seven days (but imagined for eight months), produced with merely two thousand dollars, Los Nadie (literally The Nobodies) it’s – as explained by selection committee member Beatrice Fiorentino in her essay in the Critics’ Week catalogue – “ spirit de jeunesse at its more pure, vivid and kicking state (…) for Juan Sebastián Mesa, who debuts in long feature developing characters and stories from a previous short, it’s enough a song, a tear and a gesture to evoke the tenderness that coexists with the rage and the disorientation of an entire generation”.



To check the announcement at the official site go here.