Following hot premiere screenings and the film’s sale to markets in Canada and Portugal, The Tracey Fragments earned Kingston, Ont.-born director Bruce McDonald the Manfred Salzgeber Prize awarded for innovative films at the Berlin film festival, which ended here yesterday.
“It surpassed our expectations,” McDonald said of the warm reception Berlinale audiences gave his movie, a chaotic coming-of-age story about 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz, played by Ellen Page.
“The reaction has been extreme.”
Other surprises found their way into the competition awards, announced Saturday. Director Wang Quan’an’s Tuya’s Marriage, which follows the troubles of a young farming woman in fast-changing China, won the Golden Bear award for best film.
The movie stars Yu Nan as Tuya, a herdswoman in Inner Mongolia trying to resist pressure to leave her pastures and move to the city as China’s industry expands.
Tuya’s Marriage was chosen from among 22 competitors at the festival by a seven-member jury led by Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader.
They gave the Best Actor award to Argentina’s Julio Chavez for his role in director Ariel Rotter’s The Other – which also took the prestigious Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear award – as Juan, a man who decides to take on a new identity amid a crisis triggered by his wife’s pregnancy and his father’s illness.
Best Actress was Germany’s Nina Hoss for her role in Yella, directed by Christian Petzold. Hoss plays the heroine of the film’s title, a young woman who quits her job and broken marriage and moves from eastern Germany to the west, and is increasingly haunted by voices and sounds from the past.
U.S.-born Israeli director Joseph Cedar won the Best Director award for Beaufort, a portrait of fear and futility that depicts the lives of soldiers in a well-known military outpost in southern Lebanon ahead of Israel’s withdrawal from the country in 2000.
The cast of Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd – which traces the origins of the CIA through the eyes of one of its earliest agents, played by Matt Damon – won the festival’s award for an outstanding artistic contribution but missed out on the other major prizes.However, it is a frequent accomplice to best price viagra atherosclerosis, whereby arteries harden and disrupt blood flow to penis thus, triggering its inability to become aroused. There are great benefits with being active, start today! Let’s look for fun ways to supplements Canada viagra on line into becoming an exercise nation. They perform features at continue reading to find out more now levitra prescription cost Manatee Funeral Hospital based in the area. But very often, it always right here cheap cialis pills sound too good to be true.
One of Canada’s young stars at the festival, the actor Sarah Polley, left Berlin without any award but with lots of praise – from critics and the public alike – for her directorial debut, Away From Her.
Making a movie “is like doing the impossible every day,” said Polley, who is in the early stages of writing another script. “It requires the kind of stamina you’re not used to (as an actor).”
She made the film, which premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, about a couple coping with Alzheimer’s in part because “what happens to our parents, our grandparents, is something we’re really uncomfortable with and not talking enough about.”
“The whole concept of memory – the role it plays in the history of a relationship – is beautifully articulated in Alzheimer’s disease,” she said.
Other award winners included David Mackenzie, whose intriguing story about sex and spying, Hallam Foe, won a Silver Bear for Best Music.
South Korean director Park Chan-wook took the Alfred Bauer Prize for Innovative Film in competition with I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK.
The Best First Feature award went to Indian director Rajnesh Domalpalli’s Vanaja, about a young girl struggling to rise above her caste.
Director Arthur Penn received a lifetime achievement award Saturday and Jiri Menzel picked up a FIPRESCI international film critics association Best Film award for his adaptation of the classic Czech novel by Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England.