ASTRA FILM GRAND PRIZE
PHNOM PENH LULLABY by Pawel Kloc (Poland)
JURY'S MOTIVATION
The film captures the conflict in a strange couple’s private existence and draws a portrait of a complex man who is caught between realism and naivety and whose genuine desire for love clashes with a society corrupted by mass prostitution. The filmmaker shares with his protagonists an uncomfortable situation, keeping just the right distance from them and leaving the audience with the sad sense of life’s disappointing truth. The Jury was really impressed by this intense and painful journey to the end of the night.
ASTRA FILM AWARD FOR THE BEST DOCUMENTARY IN THE INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
offered by HBO Romania
HE THINKS HE'S THE BEST by Maria Kuhlberg (Sweden)
JURY'S MOTIVATION
The scars from childhood may stigmatize people for all their lives. This film shows a unique effort of a family to drop the baton of painful memories and help two brothers to understand each other. The author succeeded in doing a truly sincere and intimate film, that urges the viewers to identify with the protagonists and look also to our own past and present relationships with the closest people of our personal universe.
ASTRA FILM AWARD FOR THE BEST DOCUMENTARY IN THE COMPETITION „ROMANIA”
COMMON GROUND by Anne Schiltz & Charlotte Grégoire (Belgium)
JURY'S MOTIVATION
The jury has appreciated the ingenuity and understanding of the authors in dealing with a subject devoid of any glamour, in an act of restitution of the beauty and truthfulness contained in the inglorious moments of the life in a block of appartments, with the mundane gestures and smiles of the people who live close to us.
„ROMANIAN REALITIES” AWARD
NOOSFERA by Artchil Khetagouri & Ileana Stanculescu (Romania)
JURY'S MOTIVATION
Any debate on love is subjected to controversy. It has been the case of the jury members, who have expressed diverse feelings for one or another of the films in this competition. However, since love cannot be trapped between walls, or since some walls enclose three simultaneous love stories, for the intrinsical humour of the approach, and for a universal reality, even if the story happens in Romania, for the subtle protraying of the characters, and in appreciation of a well-done filmmakers’ work.
ASTRA FILM AWARD FOR THE BEST DOCUMENTARY IN THE ECOCINEMATOGRAFF COMPETITION
offered by Environmental Partnership Foundation
GONE WILD by Dan Curean (Romania)
JURY'S MOTIVATION
While being a documentary, which primarily focuses on wild animals, the film eventually offers a deep anthropological experience and in a gentle way shows the so greatly contested fragility of our ecosystem. Furthermore, Dan Curean happened to capture in the movie the very process of man’s lost innocence, a moment when the good and the bad starts to take sides. A very cinematographic movie with unforgettable scenery of the Danube Delta, a wilderness and evoking the fragility of a place where humans are subordinate, confronted by the power of the nature. Gone Wild is a movie that stays in one’s mind long after being seen.
ASTRA FILM AWARD FOR THE BEST DOCUMENTARY IN THE STUDENT COMPETITION, ex aequo
MY KOSHER SHIFTS by Iris Zaki (UK)
JURY'S MOTIVATION
It is in the simplicity of the technical procedure - a camera set at the reception desk of a hotel - that the director, Iris Zaki, brings us these slices of life and of her meeting with the other. At this hotel desk the most trivial conversations are mixed up with the most revelatory. With an assured montage, the director produces a fine, intense regard on religion and life.
ASTRA FILM AWARD FOR THE BEST DOCUMENTARY IN THE STUDENT COMPETITION, ex aequo
THE LAST STREET de Rasmus Sievers & Marina Monsonís (Germany, Spain)
JURY'S MOTIVATION
The 1992 Olympic Games was one reason the traditional quarter of sailors and fishermen in Barcelona underwent a grand metamorphosis: this film plunges us into the colours of the mediterannean and into the atmosphere of the delicious moments during a festival in this quarter. Moments of gentle poetry in an ambience that mixes at one and the same time a nostalgia for the past and a renewed desire to bring back fraternity back to life - Rasmus Sieves and Marina Monsonis have authored a documentary that is simultaneously light, authentic but also profoundly in touch with humanity.
SPECIAL AWARD FOR ROMANIAN DOCUMENTARY
offered by Revista Formula AS
ROSIA MONTANA, TOWN ON THE BRINK by Fabian Daub (Germany, Romania)
JURY'S MOTIVATION
The national magazine Formula AS has been lobbying in the past 10 years to save Rosia Montana. For this reason, we are honoured to award a well accomplished and unbiased documentary that succeedes to keep the public opinion focused on a place on the edge indeed.